Back in Kevin Poulsen's hacker days, before he became writer and Wired editor, he pulled stunts like taking over the phone lines in a radio contest to win himself a Porsche, or breaking into the FBI's computer system when he ended up on the agency's Most Wanted list to change his physical description. He served a five-year sentence for his crimes. Now he's consulting for Hollywood hacker films.
Poulsen's story itself was not the inspiration for the film Blackhat; it came from Kingpin,Poulsen's 2012 account of Max "Vision" Butler, a white hat hacker who when released from an 18-month cybercrime sentence could no longer find proper employment and turned to the other side. Max Vision provided the framework for Hathaway, the hacker played by Chris Hemsworth (yes, the sexiest man alive) in Blackhat.
As we've pointed out before, Hollywood has a really hard time making hacking look interesting in a movie, and even harder time portraying it accurately. Blackhat comes about as close as anything we've seen before, and it wouldn't have done so without Poulsen's expert influence. We talked to him about the process.
Gizmodo: What do you think Blackhat got right, and what did it get more right than other computer crime movies in the past? And did it miss anything?
Poulsen: The biggest thing it got right was broadly the international nature of cybercrime—how a single attack can implicate so many countries. It's gonna go through a bunch of different servers, and it can be very hard to pin down who's behind it.
But that's something that hasn't really been done in movies before. Then we put a lot of work into finding plausible ways that malware and hosting arrangements and all these other things could be used to advance the plot and all of that I think turned out pretty nice.
It must have been hard to determine a way to show computer activity on a screen in a way that's exciting.
Yeah, well, he (director Michael Mann) did this great CGI at the beginning of the film. I had nothing to do with that, but that turned out really good. When I learned that he planned on trying to visualize a computer intrusion with graphics, I immediately thought of all these other movies where that's been done just horribly, and I voiced that concern and he wound up having this very specific plan to make it this very physical look. And I think he actually got the EDA file for an actual chipset and motherboard and put that right into the CGI, so it's actually very authentic.
http://gizmodo.com/what-blackhat-gets-right-a-chat-with-former-hacker-kev-1679728958
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