2024-11-23 –, Ngaio Marsh Theatre
Everyone knows that in 1996, David Levinson saved the world by hacking the aliens with his trusty Macintosh PowerBook. Despite the memes you may have seen, this cyberattack is actually plausible, and I can prove it. Let's break down the famous ID4 hacking scene, map it onto Lockheed-Martin's Cyber Kill Chain, and give Mr. Levinson some well-deserved credit!
"But Ben," I hear you protest, "Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich only intended for the aliens to be defeated by a computer virus as a nod to the alien invasion in H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds being defeated by organic viruses! It wasn't meant to be realistic!"
That's where you're wrong, kiddo. Devlin enlisted Chris Weaver (Distinguished Professor of Computational Media at Wesleyan, Director of Smithsonian Spark!Lab Outreach Initiatives, and the founder of Bethesda Softworks LLC!) as the technical consultant and inspiration for the character of David Levinson. There absolutely is a sound 1990s-era cybersecurity foundation here and it goes way beyond Devlin's half-arsed AMA explanation that Levinson simply flipped zeroes and ones to invert the alien signal!
We'll cover some very important technical context featured in the novelisation (also written by Dean Devlin) and deleted scenes from the movie, and follow the cyberattack step-by-step through the Lockheed-Martin Cyber Kill Chain from Reconnaissance to Actions On Objectives. Finally, we'll talk about what the aliens did wrong, and how to remediate these vulnerabilities to ensure good cybersecurity hygiene for a successful planetary invasion.
(And I promise I'll keep the "fan wank" to an absolute minimum.)
Ben is a web application penetration tester who has been living in Aotearoa for a few years now. When he’s not hacking he’s probably running tabletop RPGs, getting motion sick in VR, walking his cat, or tramping through the Waitakeres.