Hello. As I am currently busy with my cybersecurity course I thought I would post the double bill I made for the young film event programmers group I am a part of. Perhaps it can give others some ideas.
You will notice this double bill merges into my IT and cybersecurity interests as well.
Featured Photo: Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
The theme for my double bill revolves around computers and the cyberspace. my general target audience for this are people who have an interest in computers and science-fiction cyber threats. My double bill especially aims to interest those in information technology and cybersecurity.
WarGames is an American film that came out in 1983. The movie is a Cold War science-fiction techno-thriller film. The film was written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Bedham. It was a box-office success, grossing $125 million worldwide and was nominated for three Academy Awards.
Walter F. Parkes has produced more than 50 movies during his career which includes Men in Black and Minority Report, he and his wife also helped to build the well-known American film distribution label DreamWorks.
For Lawrence Lasker who co-wrote WarGames alongside Parkes it was his debut into American film. Lasker went on to produce and write some other movies including producing Project X and Awakenings alongside Parkes.
John Bedham is best known for his films Saturday Night Fever, 1979’s Dracula, Blue Thunder, Short Circuit, and Stakeout as well as WarGames.
The movie stars are Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood and Ally Sheedy. The movie revolves around the fictional danger of accidentally hacking into a US military supercomputer.
The movie, taking place during the Cold War, highlights the danger of nuclear war between the two superpowers of the time, the United States and the Soviet Union, and the implications it has for bringing an end to the world.
The movie remains relevant to even today as the world becomes more automated. Cyber threats are more prominent than ever and have the potential to one day be catastrophic. It has us question whether we should keep automating so many things to computers and eliminate any human involvement on decision-making.
This movie shows us the possible consequences of doing this on something that is so profoundly deadly to all life on Earth. Accidentally hacking into a system should certainly be impossible, but there is always a very real threat from determined people who mean to do harm.
No matter how secure something is it will never be enough in the cyberworld. You can only try to remain one step ahead of these people, naturally there will be times where you won’t be able to.
That will always be the danger in the cyber-space, nothing is completely secure even if it uses the best known security mechanism and encryption algorithm known.
WarGames gives us a fictional taste of a worst case scenario. It lets us imagine and live through the excitement on the edge of our seat wondering how this Pandora’s Box will be closed. And it will have us imagine about such a thing happening in our own reality.
Die Hard 4.0, also called Live Free or Die Hard in North America, is a 2007 action-thriller movie and the fourth film of the Die Hard franchise. The movie was directed by Len Wiseman, also a screenwriter and producer, who is also known for his work on the Underworld horror series and the American science-fiction film Total Recall.
The movie stars Bruce Willis, Timothy Olyphant, Justin Long, Cliff Curtis, and Maggie Q. Die Hard 4.0 was based on a 1997 article written by John Carlin for Wired magazine called A Farewell to Arms.
The article in question highlights ‘games’ where Pentagon officials go over hypothetical worsening scenarios that threaten the United States either within or from outside. One particularly increasing focus was on a so-called ‘Pearl Harbour’ cyber attack. Although since then it may be more apt to refer to it as a cyber ‘9/11’. Basically a massive cyber attack against critical infrastructure that threatens mass casualties and disruption.
Former US Deputy Attorney General Jaime Gorelick has said that a cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbour will happen at some point and that they want to be ready for it.
The article highlighted the difference in thinking between various US agencies on how to protect against the growing threat of cyber attacks, and that there were often no clear or obvious solutions, and little centralisation.
The article also goes over various questions on entering the digital age, such as what an act of war would be, what an appropriate response is, what civil liberties might need to be changed, what roles would conventional armed forces have if any? Is this a farewell to arms? and so on…
The Chinese had already been preparing for entry into the digital age. They see a change from mechanized warfare of the industrial revolution towards information warfare of the information age. They see information war involving decisions and control, that it would be a war of knowledge and intellect. They forsee war as changing from self-preservation and elimination of their enemies towards self-preservation and control over enemies.
They hypothesised that control over their enemies would involve the usage of electronic warfare, tactical deception, strategic deterrence, propaganda warfare, psychological warfare, network warfare, and structural sabotage via the growing digital cyberspace.
Something that in older times would take so much more planning and organisation could be conducted from your home country without having to leave, with far less planning, smaller budgets, and far less time, with little if any risk to manpower. Intelligence of their opponents would need to be much quicker to react to catch such a thing and stop it.
One wondered back then if the slow world of government bureacracy, with its rigid, hierarchical and procedural traits could keep up with the ever evolving and fast moving cyber threats that are not subject to the same clunky systems that have worked for previous conventional conflicts. One can still wonder this even today, cyber security has improved by leaps and bounds, but so too have the ever evolving cyber threats. It’s the current age arms race – a digital arms race.
And a digital arms race can be taken part in by so many more than just governments and organised groups, even a simple tech-savvy geek can come up with a new exploit that can change the cyber environment in a heart beat. The next cyber nuke could just as easily be made by a computer hobbyist as it could some computer scientist. Imagine if that was the case with actual nukes.
Anyone can be a major weapon online if they are determined enough. Freely available information gives us all we need to know right at our fingertips. It seems impossible that governments and officials can keep up alone. One tactic they do use is recruiting such people when they are found. But it could only take one of them to be a bad apple.
The unstructured nature of the cyberspace, the freely available resources, the usage of free time, very little financial need, the impossibility of totally restricting software, the ease of making new software slightly tweaked to get around any fleeting restrictions.
All these things mean it could be almost anyone and cybersecurity will always be overcome at some point.
The movie itself sees John McClane attempting to stop a cyber-terrorist attack on government and commercial systems in the United States, with the ultimate aim of disabling key elements of the nation’s infrastructure.
It is another movie that lets us immerse ourself into the fantasy of a grand cyber-attack with massive national and global implications. It also shows us these attacks causing very real suffering and even death amongst all the chaos.
Although like WarGames it is largely a fantasy, it still gives us a the ability to observe the cyberworld today and consider what kinds of threats it could face in the future as more and more things move online and are therefore susceptible to being tampered with by cyber criminals, and other hostile states and groups.
We are yet to face a cyber attack that has caused actual death but we have come close in the past on a number of occassions, and although such attacks would be no where near as cataclysmic as they are in the movies featured here, they are still terrifying.
One event involved a drinking water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida in February 2021. In this a cyber criminal or team of cyber criminals attempted to raise the level of sodium hydroxide (lye) by more than 100-fold from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million.
Sodium hydroxide is used to control water acidity in drinking water, but at high levels it is poisonous to humans. The scary thing is the hackers were succesful in getting into the system and raising this chemical, but luckily a human operator sitting at the monitoring station at the time noticed the odd activity and quickly returned the chemicals to usual levels before it had a chance to turn into a catastrophe.
If it was not for that one human operator noticing something off, there would have certainly been a mass casualty incident that may have also involved deaths. Other water treatment plants have also faced attempted intrusions and it remains a continuing threat to the populace.
Despite this threat lawmakers continue to focus on cybersecurity legislation that focuses largely on the energy and transportation network, this is particularly the case in the US. This focus is a good thing, but water infrastructure and systems should also be included. Let’s hope that it does not have to take a mass casualty incident before action is taken.
There was also the Wannacry attack that crippled NHS systems in the UK for a short time that if it had lasted longer could very well have led to hospital deaths due to the disablement of essential life-saving systems and administration.
There have always been dark people in the world who have enjoyed death and suffering and the growing cyberworld will likely give these kinds of people a new outlet to experiment with.
It is certain that at some point in the near future there will be a cyber attack that will cause deaths and widespread disruption. It is the inevitability of the online digital age.
These movies give us the most extreme and sensationalised view of this new reality. Although the things seen in these movies almost certainly would never happen in real life, such smaller scale events certainly will at some point. And thinking about that while watching these movies, is what makes it scary.
I would also like to include this Die Hard movie as a tribute to Bruce Willis who has retired from his acting career due to his diagnosis of Aphasia. It is a horrible neuro-degenerative condition that affects a person’s ability to communicate.
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