Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

https://hackertarget.com/hacker-tools-mr-robot//

by thewanderer1999 • 11 years ago

234 85 11 years ago

jfaucett2• 11 years ago

I've seen so many ridiculous "hacking" sequences in films that I really wasn't expecting this series to go into as much realistic detail as they do. Also most hacking stuff in films is at its worst when it comes to the dialogue which somehow always has to have something to do with shutting down a "mainframe".

But this series does a great job both from a tech and dialogue perspective. There's even a scene where the main character and the CTO of another corp (trying not to spoil anything), have a conversation about gnome vs. kde.

EDIT: after doing some reading looks like the writer/creator is responsible a lot of this realism see: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/06/24/mr_robot_gay_c.... Here's an interesting reddit response feed from him: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3bp1zz/i_am_sam_esmai...

n0us• 11 years ago

Every time they show a terminal the actors are typing live, unlike most shows/films like say Silicon Valley where the screen is a video.

miyuru• 11 years ago

when tor was mentioned in the opening scene of the first episode, i knew that this show was different.

jfaucett2• 11 years ago

yea especially when in that same line they mentioned onion routing and explained traffic monitoring by comprising tor exit nodes.

Tloewald3• 11 years ago

I particularly hate unrealism which is hopelessly unnecessary, such as showing people using ridiculously bad faux search engines and email clients, or results displays that rub your face in the result: SUSPECT IDENTIFIED with one result on the screen, vs. a list of results the person has to interpret.

Gnome vs. KDE is probably the least technical thing they've gotten right in the show. There were a couple of minor howlers in the most recent episode, unfortunately (up until then, no significant lapses I've noticed -- staggering for a TV show).

krapp2• 11 years ago

or results displays that rub your face in the result: SUSPECT IDENTIFIED with one result on the screen, vs. a list of results the person has to interpret.

That's the entire point, though - telling the viewer who the villain is quickly (and, most importantly, cost effectively) to get to the part where the hero busts down their door. Designing the UIs realistically and eating up valuable screen time with analysts poring over the data would be a waste of money in most cases.

Also, realistic design increases the chances of someone actually suing for copyright infringement or something.

fla• 11 years ago

IP ADDRESS FOUND : 593.102.340

It always bugged me. Does anyone know why realisators spend so much energy into making faux computer interfaces in almost every movie/show ?

tottenhm• 11 years ago

As the Gnome-KDE bit unfolded, my first reaction was, "Guffaw! What a silly detail! That's not proving any thing. And no one would expect to bond with a stranger over that."

But that is not a flaw or limitation in the writing -- it's helping to characterize Tyrell as a bit of douche. This goes beyond the typical 'ssh' or 'wget' screengrab (which only provides some mechanistic plausibility in achieving a plot-point.). The Gnome-KDE bit defines character. It's brilliant.

vezzy-fnord2• 11 years ago

There's even a scene where the main character and the CTO of another corp (trying not to spoil anything), have a conversation about gnome vs. kde.

Haven't watched the show, but this reminded me of that awful line from The Internship, a film I was baited into watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpdngXQOkBI

varelse• 11 years ago

The Internship and Mr. Robot have about as much in common as Twilight and Fight Club (all IMO of course)...

jayzalowitz• 11 years ago

What I love about that movie is that google tried to use it to re-recruit people from my internship (I mean we all interned at google togeather so in reality it was more of a reunion but still...)

swang• 11 years ago

Funniest things from that movie.

1. Interns worried about jobs after internship at GOOGLE 2. Google has live support chat. HA-HA-HA.

jradd• 11 years ago

Technical acuity aside, mr robot would be superb in and of itself… however the accuracy makes this show _nearly_ flawless so far imo.

I just hope the creator prepared for this great reception, and continues to deliver!

adamnemecek2• 11 years ago

CTO of another corp

Not to nitpick but he's not the CTO.

wut42• 11 years ago

He almost was :p

forgotmypassw• 11 years ago

There were a few subtle slips in the show but overall they're doing a good job at keeping it as real as possible (within television's scope). Someone, for once, thought about hiring consultants I suppose.

Cyph0n• 11 years ago

I read that they hired a consultant from the CIA. Not sure if true of course, but whoever he is he's doing a good job.

xasos• 11 years ago

They hire a lot of technical consultants - Silicon Valley does as well [0].

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-how-season-1-b...

m_fayer2• 11 years ago

While the technical stuff mostly manages to avoid degrading into gibberish, I find the philosophizing about "bugs in the system" cringe-worthy. The show would have the layman believe that bugs are some kind of metaphysical agents of chaos that crack the facade of reality (or something), as opposed to reality where most bugs are caused by sloppy copy-pasting while reading HN with one eye.

pslam• 11 years ago

In a sense, this is true. The view that all bugs are static, determinable, and caused by a lack of care and attention, is old fashioned and demonstrably wrong.

In mature code bases (e.g core linux kernel), (almost) all the low hanging bugs have been picked clean. There remain only faults triggered by untested configurations, unconsidered usages, and by ordering non-determinism. The last one is particularly chaotic - you can have a system which stays up for years, but falls over due to an extremely unlikely combination of events.

Think about it this way: every statically compiled program with an unbounded loop, in which there are calls to malloc() with runtime-determined sizes, and differently ordered but balanced free() at later times, may crash. This is a possibility despite there being no leaks and worst case size fits in memory. The issue is the heap, with some combinations of allocation sizes, and order of malloc vs free, will fragment and effectively "leak", eventually exhausting resources. It is generally not determinable whether this will happen to a program. They all survive at the whim of probability, although the odds are usually very much in their favor.

reddotX• 11 years ago

Hollywood Technodrama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDsiYi4LwFI

bayesianhorse3• 11 years ago

The lead character feels to me like "Dexter as a Hacker".

smoyer2• 11 years ago

I feel sorry for the lead character and he obviously has problems, but the wannabe CTO of EvilCorp reminds me more of Dexter. This is the first TV show I've enjoyed enough to schedule for it in a long time but that character (Tyrell Wellick[1]) is a bit too dark for comfort.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0514444/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_2

burger_moon• 11 years ago

Tyrell seems more like Patrick Bateman than Dexter.

prodmerc• 11 years ago

I'm more scared of his wife - looks like she's the brains in that relationship :-)

mhd• 11 years ago

There's also some Macbeth and Hamlet going on here.

bayesianhorse3• 11 years ago

By the way, what language do they speak? I get some "hits" in my rudimentary Norwegian language skills. So either a Norwegian dialect or one of the Norse family...

vvanders• 11 years ago

After the latest episode it feels a bit more like "nerd soap opera".

bayesianhorse3• 11 years ago

Soap operas are not famous for characters dying a violent death.

atmosx2• 11 years ago

I totally disliked the series... It's poorly written, disconnected and the lead character doesn't convince enough. Even the story-line is totally poor IMHO.

So the only good thing is the realistic hacking scenes...

gauravagarwalr• 11 years ago

I guess having an unpopular opinion, gets you down voted here. I hope the down voting was more due to adding an unnecessary opinion here.

adamnemecek2• 11 years ago

can you give some examples of the poor writing?

slm_HN• 11 years ago

The basic problem is that the only realistic thing in the show is the hacking. Everything else is absurd.

It's a realistic show about hacking the same way that Fantasy Island was a realistic show about island vacations.

Now if they changed the title to "Fantasy Mr. Robot" so you know up front what the premise is I might be more forgiving about the plot.

cyanbane3• 11 years ago

Always been a fan of this Tumblr for cataloging movie/tv UIs - http://fakeui.tumblr.com/

I think some of the entries could serve as inspiration. Think about the effect Minority Report's UX has had. It was an idea that wasn't new, but seeing it (I think well done) in a movie gives it a more concrete goal for a lot of people (tech) and a reference point for other people (non-tech).

tsunamifury2• 11 years ago

Minority Report had almost no effect on UI as it was both internally incoherent, ergonomically untennible, and depended on non existent technology.

In fact in many ways it set back the dreams of UI by teaching a generation to value nonsensical interactions and poor ergonomics over usability

cyanbane3• 11 years ago

and depended on non existent technology.

Exactly why people are influenced by it.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

and depended on non existent technology

That itself ain't bad. Star Trek: The Next Generation pretty much introduced the world to the concept of touchscreens, back in the time when they pretty much didn't exist.

Also, somehow the "internally incoherent" movie UIs still feel order of magnitude better than what we use in the real world, especially on mobile, which is mostly a mess of crappy and incoherent design.

crs• 11 years ago

Just as an FYI, the designer of the Minority Report UI/UX created a company (http://www.oblong.com) and actually built the system. Boeing (my former company) actually has a patent using the system to control a swarm of UAVs.

I'd checkout John Underkoffler's Ted Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit...

RexRollman• 11 years ago

My favorite movie UIs are in Alien (mother's terminal) and the interface in Tron Legacy to Encom OS[1].

http://jtnimoy.com/blogs/projects/14881671-tron-legacy

r3bl3• 11 years ago

I think you'll like DEX UI then. It's actually a real thing and it looks like this: https://vimeo.com/117199764

skeuomorf• 11 years ago

Oh, you're gonna love this [0] and the work of Territory Studio[1]. Also, check out r/unixporn [2], it has some cool stuff.

[0] http://www.hudsandguis.com/

[1] https://www.behance.net/TerritoryStudio

[2] https://reddit.com/r/unixporn

seiji• 11 years ago

Elliot's most powerful hacker tool: his heart.

r3bl3• 11 years ago

I'd say his brain because he pretty much hacked his whole personality (hint: this week's episode).

avinassh2• 11 years ago

In one of the scenes, where Darlene enters the commands like this: http://i.imgur.com/cGN3FQw.jpg

(for those who don't get it, she is entering a space before every command so that it doesn't end up in `history`)

smoyer2• 11 years ago

Assuming of course she or someone else had set HISTCONTROL to ignorespace (as follows):

    export HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

nevir• 11 years ago

Doesn't that default to on in most environments?

r3bl3• 11 years ago

In that whole GNOME vs. KDE scene, what's bugging me is that Elliot doesn't seem to be using GNOME. If he's really using it, GNOME was modified quite a bit.

EDIT: Looks like it's a modified GNOME 2 (https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/3bd1ms/wha...)

keithdebus• 11 years ago

null-byte.wonderhowto.com is running a series on the details of the Mr. Robot hacks. Might be worth checking out.

ddw• 11 years ago

The screen stuff has been legit but two things were funny:

1. Eliot, an elite hacker, has a Excel 2014 book in his apartment. Why does he need to use Excel so much? Why does he need Excel at all if he's using Linux? And why would he need a user guide to figure it out? 2. When Eliot has to fix a hack to E Corp at Allsafe his boss gives him a folder of paper logs and says "look through these"

ch0wn• 11 years ago

1. Eliot, an elite hacker, has a Excel 2014 book in his apartment. Why does he need to use Excel so much? Why does he need Excel at all if he's using Linux? And why would he need a user guide to figure it out?

While I agree that it's more likely that the prop team got this when they were task to buy some "computer books", I have some similarly useless books in my shelves that I got from relatives when I was younger because they thought "I was into computers".

mattcaldwell• 11 years ago

It seems such a book might be useful for developing hacks to target Excel.

em3rgent0rdr• 11 years ago

1. is probaby a mistake by set designers. Although hypothetically one could argue that (A) he actually needed to refernence Microsoft Excel for one of his hacks and kept it around (B) it is a disguise for when people enter his apartment and sees the MS Excel book cover, they will not think he is a hacker (and who knows what is actually contained in the book cover...could be some secret hacking stuff inside).

2. Sometimes, if extra paranoid about being hacked, may want to do things with paper as much as possible. Also, were they going on an airplane? That might explain need to have paper copies so have something to look over during silly takeoff and landing procedure. Also, to be honest, paper can be much more usable.

rory096• 11 years ago

Author missed DeepSound, the program used to embed secret data onto audio CDs.

http://jpinsoft.net/DeepSound/

ericjang• 11 years ago

Actually, I'm pretty sure a lot of security professionals don't use Kali Linux because 1) they only need a subset of the pentest tools, 2) many companies' internal monitoring systems trigger alerts if they detect someone is using Kali Linux/BT (via OS fingerprinting).

This is only my anecdotal experience though - thoughts?

todd3834• 11 years ago

That might be true, although it does seem like a reasonable choice for authenticity in a tv show.

elixx• 11 years ago

If you can fingerprint a penetration workstation, they're doing it wrong

lotharbot2• 11 years ago

I was really confused by this headline -- having not seen the show, but knowing an indie video game by the same name (http://moonpod.com/English/about_mr.robot.php ) that used the word "hacking" to describe RPG-ish battles set inside the circuitry of other robots.

It is refreshing to see on-screen depictions of hacking that use legitimate tools in ways they're actually used in, instead of "GUI interface using visual basic to track the killers IP address" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU ).

nickysielicki• 11 years ago

I'd just like to say that Mr. Robot is not a show that is enjoyable only for the HN-like crowd. The cinematography is fantastic, the plot is engaging, the aspect of Elliot being an unreliable narrator is unique, and the realistic hacking is just a bonus.

Do check it out.

beeforpork2• 11 years ago

One thing that bugged me: why is he using DVD-Rs? I (almost) haven't used such ancient technology in years. Many modern computers don't even have DVD drivers. And then with hand-written labels on then. WTF? Those can be found and read(!) by laymen. No way! He should just have a few (encrypted) externel HDDs or use cloud storage or something.

Otherwise: great show getting so much stuff right without boring the hell out of people who don't recognise what's on the screens. That's special. I love it.

husam212• 11 years ago

Actually, he uses a software called DeepSound to encrypt the data as audio files (music), the hand-written labels are album/artist/band names of the audio files.

beeforpork2• 11 years ago

Ha, so he's smarter than me. Very good! I love this show. :-)

luck87• 11 years ago

I know this is only a movie, a good movie, but in the episode 3 Elliot speaks about bugs. In some case, could it be right? Elliot: A bug is never just a mistake. It represents something bigger. An error of thinking. http://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewtopic.php?f=303&t...

shaaaaawn• 11 years ago

Subtle http://2600.com reference in the Netscape browser. Timely

mindcrime• 11 years ago

Just started watching this show tonight - so far I find myself wanting to like it, but man, the socialist bullshit is laid on so heavy it's ridiculous. :-(

Still, at least it is a show about hackers that shows "computer stuff" in a semi-realistic light. No crazy 3D "inside the computer" visuals like in Hackers or most other movies and television programs about this stuff.

The Gnome vs. KDE bit was a nice touch. As soon as that scene was over, I was already thinking "I'm probably going to like this show". Anyway, I'm impressed enough to keep watching and see how it all develops from here.

Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

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