Hacker Cinema
Takedown
2000 · Film · 92 min
Directed by Joe Chappelle
Kevin Mitnick is quite possibly the best hacker in the world. Hunting for more and more information, seeking more and more cyber-trophies every day, he constantly looks for bigger challenges. When he breaks into the computer of a security expert and an ex-hacker, he finds one - and much more than that...
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24 comments on Hacker News
Having read and enjoyed ghost in the wires (and at some point all of mitnicks books) - I still enjoy the infamous takedown movie. I think it still shows a lot of mindset around social engineering - and realistic holes in security measures. I do understand why a lot of people were pissed off, though.
Ed: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
Alas the book (and the movie) were trash, rather like Shimomura. Anyone who knew Kevin, knew that Takedown was egotistical BS.
If you really want to know about "the pursuit of Mitnick," watch Freedom Downtime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Downtime
https://archive.org/details/FreedomDowntime-TheStoryOfKevinMitnick
I will always remember when the "Takedown" movie came out. I loved the original "Hackers" and couldn't wait for "Hackers 2" which was Takedown.
I had learned about Mitnick few years prior to the movie and was fascinated by his life story and what he had done up to that point (including his "takedown" by the FBI). It's an understatement to say that his work, character and some sort of positive social manipulation put a great influence on my upbringing and later my professional career. Back then I enjoyed playing pranks with my friends and "hacking" them with all sorts of trojans and ejecting their CD roms :)
I am very sad to hear that he's gone. RIP Legend.
Takedown was my favorite movie as a kid. It influenced me a lot. In Brazil is not common to have a bathtub in your bathroom, we used suicide showers (term that I recently learned on YouTube); anyway, the image of Mitnick hacking in the tube on his laptop resonated with me, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
May he rest in peace.
Watch "Freedom downtime".
There they make it clear that the New York Times columnist and book author John Markoff made up absolutely everything.
The movie "Track Down" (US) / "Takedown" is also full of BS.
You may like Takedown (2000) and Antitrust (2001) a lot more than Hackers. Takedown, sometimes referred to as Hackers 2, has nothing to do with the Hackers movie (which in my opinion is pure crap that became popular only thanks to a young Angelina Jolie in it) and tells the dramatized but true story of Kevin Mitnick and how he was captured.
Takedown (2000)
Based on the book by Tsutomu Shimomura. It's the story of how Kevin Mitnick was captured. All the tech/hacks in the movie are real as far as I remember.
Takedown, the kevin Mitnick story was a cool watch. Also Blackhat was another good one. Another favorite of cheesy old 80's films is Prime Risk.
Takedown is a very good film, hard to get/see too.
That being said I’m not sure that’s what hacker refers to in HN.
I always thought Takedown was decent https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
This is based on Tsutomu Shimomura's account of the events that culminated in the arrest of Kevin Mitnick.
at least the tech was real and accurate as far as I remember but not about hackers in the true sense of the word.
If you want good non-fiction stories about true hackers I would recommend the book 'Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution'
Replying to myself here to add- I think the movie Takedown is the better 'real' hacking movie as it involves the story of the legendary Kevin Mitnick, and shows real phreaking, hacking, and social engineering. Great movie of you've not seen it!
This reminds me of the situation with Takedown / Track Down[1]. That movie was riddled with factual inaccuracies, especially ones slanted towards making Kevin Mitnick look bad and ones meant to glorify Tsutomu Shimomura. As I recall, there was a scene that featured a chase through the streets of Seattle between the two men, it may have even featured a physical tussle between them, but my memory is a bit fuzzy now. Anyway, in reality, at the point in time depicted there, the two had never even met, much less participated in a foot chase / scuffle on the streets of Seattle.
I think Mitnick ultimately sued and got a settlement of some sort, FWIW.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_Down
Takedown (2000) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
Antitrust (2001) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
Like many others I don´t consider HTML and CSS programming. To some PHP isen´t even a programming language it´s a scripting language. But I ended up programming/scripting PHP. I like it, I feel at home in it, and it does what I want to accomplish. Make stuff for the web. 14 years ago I started learning HTML, I wanted to make websites, after that I had delusions thanks to movies like Operation Takedown, Hackers and Antitrust about being a hacker. I learned the basic concepts in C++, C# and Java, but I diden´t know what I wanted to do, so I froze, and stopped learning in those languages. There is a term PHP is forgiving and it is, some of what is natural to PHP might bite you in the ass if you go on to C# for instance or Java. But you´ve still got a bunch of programming concepts down that you can reuse. If you can find a drive, something you want to accomplish in the language, be it a web or desktop project. Then you will learn. I hope you find this useful. Whatever you decide to do good luck on your journey to becoming a programmer.
A Beautiful Mind isn't as long ago as you think: less than 15 years. In the space of cinema (which was producing films about famous artists at least as early as the '30s) that's not very long. Takedown and Pirates of Silicon Valley are also a bit different: hacking has been part of "pop culture" since the mid 90s at least, and Pirates is a documentary anyway.
We have been making films about technical people for a while. A Beautiful Mind comes to mind first I am sure I can find some more.
Takedown, and Pirates of Silicon Valley are some others.
Funny as I search for more about actual people, a lot of fictional movies were created around the time the dot com bubble burst.
23 (the German original, not the similarily-named holkywood turky!) is great. Fwiw I love Hackers too, but they are so different, it's hard to compare them.
I also like "Hackers 2"/"Takedown" despite the various controversies (the book being a rip off of another book, the script being a rip off, both book and script being factually inaccurate etc).
Still now that Mitnicks own autobiography is out, while the movie might not be a kind treatment of him, or his friends. I still think it's quite a good hacker film, with some traces of accurancy (think "inspired by true events" rather than "based on").
Btw, the name "Hackers 2" was just an attempt at marketing - the two films have nothing to do with each other.
Sneakers[1] > Track Down/Takedown[2] > Hackers[3] > Sword Fish[4]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
[4] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/
23 is the best hacker film I know of. It's German and based on the Karl Koch story. It's not exclusively about hacking, necessarily, but it is far more realistic than any other I've seen.
Reboot from 2012 is a short film that features a whole lot of real world penetration testing tools and security lingo, but was overall poorly executed and nonsensical. Still worth a look just to spot all the references.
Antitrust is a programmer film. It's somewhat slow-paced and mediocre, but it has a nice scene with the Unix shell and overall tries to mimic the work environment at Microsoft.
Takedown, which although not that good, is a watchable telling of the Kevin Mitnick saga.
Travelling Salesman is based on computer scientists solving P = NP and creating a crypto weapon for use by the U.S. government. Actually quite intellectual, much like Primer.
That's all I can think of right now.
These are some movies/tv series that I deeply enjoyed and (some I) wish I had known about earlier.
9.9 Hitchhiker's guide to the universe, BBC TV series
9.9 Contact (1997) based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Very few people seem to know about this movie.
9.3 War Games
9.0 most Akiro Kurosawa movies:
Seven Samurai
High & Low
The Bad Sleep Well
Ikiru
Red Beard
9.0 Terminator 1 (watch again)
8.8 Terminator 2 (watch again)
8.7 Pirates of Silicon Valley
8.7 Matrix 1 (watch again)
8.7 The Italian Job (featuring Napster's original inventor)
8.7 Live Free or Die Hard
8.5 Track Down or Takedown (about social hacker Kevin Mitnick)
8.5 Revolution OS (2001)
8.5 Dr. Strangelove
8.5 2010 A space odyssey
8.3 Antitrust (2001)
8.3 Sneakers
8.3 COSMOS
8.2 Minority Report
8.2 2001 A space odyssey
8.2 Paycheck (2003)
8.0 The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
8.0 The Net
Takedown (2000)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
Matrix 2 rather famously involved an actual ssh escalation using nmap. Takedown (aka Track Down) was another fairly accurate example of hacking (though highly inaccurate historically). One of the more famous examples of "Movie OSes", Jurassic Park (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng), actually was a real unix system running FSN
if anyone is interested more in the authors background - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784 Takedown is one of the best hacker movies that came out.
There was a sort of 'unofficial' 'hackers 2' with Skeet Ulrich playing Kevin ("My kung-fu better than you kung-fu!") Mitnick in Takedown (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/) - the story following the book of the same name by Tsutomu Shimonura. Also, I think they recently screened 'Wargames 2 : the dead code' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/) over here in the UK. Don't forget Tron! Ah.. just hearing the sounds of the video arcade at the beginning...