One of the show’s tech consultants addressed that in this interview:
What are some of the challenges faced in presenting hacking and cybersecurity in both a realistic and an entertaining manner?
I think the biggest challenge is time. We are only given seconds to demonstrate a hack that could take hours. While we are accurate about the details of the hack, we must fudge the time element.
Yeah, when the show came out it was very well regarded as being pretty accurate.
Obviously it’s a TV show, but most of the hacks were real or based on real hacks and techniques. From what I recall most of the hacks were social engineering (dropping the USB drives trying to get someone to plug them in, using physical access to install a raspberry-pi on the network, etc.).
Realistically, I think that raspberry-pi would be found pretty quickly today. And those USB sticks would probably now trigger a visit from IT (everything you do on your corporate computer is logged. If you plug in a USB stick your admins can/will know about it, I had a friend who’s employer threatened to sue them because they downloaded personal documents off their computer using a USB, and the employer threatened to sue them over stealing trade secrets, which sounds dumb, but it was basically blackmail to try and stop him from getting another job).
I pentest regularly and people plug those usb drives in, devices get ignored.
In regards to the Pi, I worked for a bank until recently that absolutely would not have discovered it. I was dealing with IAM, not network security, but the guys who were were drowning and the structures were not in place to automatically flag this, so I’m pretty sure it’d just live on… I think outside of big, solid corporate and very tech-heavy smaller firms, this kind of approach would rarely be discovered.
In most cases I would agree.
In the instance of a heavily secured state-of-the-art datacenter with armed guards it should’ve gotten flagged immediately.
Then again thats assuming the people in the SOC aren’t massively overworked and were paying enough attention of course
Very plausible in theory, but also dramatized.
The steps tyrel took to root a phone where correct. But where he does is in seconds it took me way longer!
Yep through data center bonfires all things are possible
Just wait until you get to that season where he is talking to Daryl from the office the whole time. They lost me on that one. Did not make sense.
