This hacking concept transcends technology of any particular era, which explains why many years later, hackers are still using movie analogies to explain their work. When University of Michigan researchers exploited the electrical leakage of a chip to conceal a backdoor in it in 2016, they described it as “outside the Matrix”. When security researcher Joanna Rutkowska showed she could trap a victim’s computer inside an invisible layer of software under her control, she called it a “blue pill” attack.
“I can use Matrix To explain, it’s the woman in the red dress, but a hacker can see the code showing that woman, said Katie Moussouris, a renowned security researcher and CEO of Luta Security. change the color of her dress. “And even though you, the programmer, don’t mean to allow that, it’s entirely possible because I can check what’s really going on under the surface.”
Most of all, Matrix catch feeling Dai Zovi, who first saw the film as a 19-year-old college student, talks about hacking. A year later, he was working as a system administrator for a very early social media company called SuperFamilies.com, which had a few more Sun Microsystems workstations lying around. One Friday, he asked if he could bring one home to work on it – and found a memory-damaging flaw in its software that he had spent spring break learning how to exploit. waterfall.
When it finally succeeded, Dai Zovi experienced for the first time what it was like to take over a piece of code completely with a technique he had invented, turning it into whatever he wanted. He compared it to when Neo jumped into Agent Smith’s body, blew him up, and then stood motionless in his place while the world delicately curved around him. Dai Zovi said: “He does this flexion, and the screen pops up with bubbles, like he’s warping spacetime. “When you write your first exploit — either percent or thousandth — you feel it’s very flexible. You want to run it a million times after perfecting it, to get that feeling of power and ability. “
Hackers don’t fully use superpowers in our reality. But as networked computers seep into more physical objects – cars, home appliances, and even critical infrastructure like the power grid, water supply and manufacturing systems – modern life more and more like the Matrix. The ability to control those computer systems becomes a skill that can change the real world.
Unplugging that ubiquitous computer has, for most of us, ceased to be an option. Better, perhaps, you should put on your flared jacket, dive into the digital world, and start flexing some spoons.
This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue. Follow now.
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