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"He hacked into my car's computer!"
- Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane), Untraceable
A Cracker or Playful Hacker can cause unlimited harm/mischief in the TV world because any computer, or thing with a CPU as a component, or even with a few strands of copper wire in it, is connected to the Internet and thus becomes easily accessible and subvertible to the character's hacking skill.
Everything from NORAD to the engine computer on your SUV can be tampered with and shut down from a laptop in a room thousands of miles away. This openly defies the fact that in neither case are said computers actually online in a way they're reachable by someone on a modem.
TV writers make no distinction between the Internet and the closed intranets used by governments, militaries, or private companies. Nor do they apparently understand the fact that a lot of computers are closed systems that are responsible only to themselves, with no way to even contact the outside world, let alone receive new instructions from some malicious techie.
If it's a computer, then it's vulnerable. Period.
And as if that was not enough, you can erase a person's existence by deleting his identity records. In Hollywood, physical records like paper birth certificates and driver licenses are always null and void if the computers can't find a digital copy. Your friends and family will apparently forget you were ever born if the e-records are deleted. Less often, this is justified if the person thus deleted was a complete loner with no real life friends.
This trope is usually how an Evil Computer manages to subjugate humanity by shutting down or reprogramming everything electrical in the world, from blenders to street cameras to nuclear missiles. Again, 99% of these things aren't even online.
In a series set in The Future, of course, it might make sense to assume that most things have a connection of some kind, though no matter how networked the world gets, there will still be systems kept offline for security .
Compare Its A Small Net After All.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- After Chloe's flanderization in Smallville to become a mega hacker, she gains access to the Daily Planet's Magical Database and is able to find absolutely everything online.
- The fourth season of 24 features a terrorist plot to simultaneously melt down every nuclear reactor in the US using a piece of Applied Phlebotinum that looks like an ordinary laptop computer in a fancy attache case.
- Allegedly justified with the grumpy supercomputer Orac in Blake's 7, because its creator also invented the "Tarriel cells" that power all computers in the Federation. How it also managed to control computers installed on alien spaceships is not explained...
- Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: A Monster Of The Week infects the Humongous Mecha with a virus... that is transmitted to the base, and somehow, to an android character who has never shown to have any actual connection to the base's computers (he's got to push buttons like everybody else.) This would have actually made perfect sense in some seasons (which have literal Magical Computers that are connected by the same mystical forces) but Overdrive is all tech. OTOH, the virus was transmitted by a Magic Ninja...
- In Cybergirl, the Cyber Replicants are able to interface with any computers simply by cocking their heads. This includes security systems, AT Ms, electronic keyboards, T Vs and school computers. Only one of which is usually online.
- Cy's predecessor, Alana (in The Girl From Tomorrow), however, has a wrist device that interfaced with any and all computers. In 1990.
- In Jake 2.0, Jake use his nanites to move a new Cadillac sedan, noting that the car is computer controlled.
- Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad takes this to ridiculous levels; in one episode a "mega-virus monster" inside an alarm clock gives the main character a sequence of nightmares. Only the Rule Of Funny lets one suspend disbelief.
- Don't forget the pom-poms that were infected with a virus that uploaded whoever used them to the villain's computer. Ironically, the villain only wanted the cheerleader who owned them, but by the end of the episode the entire school (including the lunch lady, the main character's little sister, and the entire football team) were screaming floppy disks hanging from his ceiling, which he found very annoying.
- In one particularly nonsensical episode of Seven Days, an evil lovesick program manages to manipulate the knobs on gas burner stove in an elaborate Murder The Hypotenuse.
Anime
- Ed in Cowboy Bebop retaliates against a pair of ISSP policemen who try to apprehend her, by hacking into their ship's auto-pilot and deliberately crashing it. (Fortunately for them, she's a Playful Hacker and does it while it's parked outside with no one in it)
- The basic premise of Corrector Yui is Magical Girls in an online world trying to fix things in the real world, including school trips, traffic lights and medical machinery.
- In Serial Experiments Lain, everything is online, without exception, to the point that one of the catchphrases is: no matter where you go, everyone's connected. In fact, Lain once almost gets run over by a car, because of a failure in the citywide car guidance system.
- Perhaps the SEELE attack on MAGI in End of Evangelion would have failed much sooner if NERV, instead of putting up firewalls in a Race Against The Clock, had simply disconnected the bloody thing from every line connected to the outside world.
- The English dub translation for Iruel's invasion of the MAGI makes Ritsuko suggest that attempting to sever connections between different parts of MAGI or MAGI from anywhere else would require a matter of dismantling the Geofront (in the Japanese translation, she merely voices her concern about abandoning MAGI so swiftly).
- Satsuki, the hacker in X1999, has a computer that is not only sentient and can hack into anything online, but it can actually electrically manipulate the power cords themselves to attack people. Even disconnecting the computer from the network doesn't help once she's got her claws in it.
- Lampshaded when Satsuki steals Nataku's life support data. "We're being hacked and we aren't even on a network!"
- The Laughing Man from Ghost In The Shell, being a master hacker in a time where everyone's mind is at least part computer, is able to manipulate people to, among other things, remember seeing a cartoon logo instead of his face.
- Justified. People are very regularly shown accessing the internet just by thinking it, or communicating with each other the same way, so some form of "bluetooth" type hardware seems to be standard issue in implants.
- Also, they are very aware of their vulnerability to this trope, as the military has their soldiers go into autistic mode (a fancy term for running your brain in offline mode) when fighting super hackers.
- Nicely Averted in Cannon God Exaxxion, which has Artificial Humans who can hack into things like robots & space battle ships, but they have to be touching them for it to work.
Comic Books
Film
- Terminator 3 is an example of the evil computer version — in this case, Skynet. Many of the electronic things it spreads through, like cash registers, aren't even supposed to be online. Worse still, the Terminator is able to control current day automobiles through infecting them with nanobots, which doesn't explain how they could pick up the signal.
- Except that most cash registers actually do use the internet to transmit credit card information.
- Although the make the Did Not Do The Research mistake of suggesting that civilian and military networks are connected together
- The heroes of Sneakers, with the super-chip they've just stolen, are able to access anything from the Federal Reserve to the national air-traffic control system.
- This trope is the entire plot of Hackers. (Which should rather be called Crackers.)
- Wargames, probably one of the earlier instances of this trope, relies on the idea that the computer that controls the launching of nuclear missiles is accessible to anyone with a 300 baud modem.
- This is used in Live Free or Die Hard. The hackers mess up the traffic lights, TV broadcasts, and phone lines. They are, however, unable to remotely access the power grid and have to physically break into a power hub.
- Superman III, notable for displaying this trope before the Internet as we know it came along, stars a guy who figures out how to glean the fractions of cents ignored when a percentage of one's income is taken for taxes, becoming rich. The bad guys recruit him, and he undergoes Flanderization, eventually becoming an über-Cracker and controlling everything from bank accounts to traffic lights to the weather itself (by messing with satellites.)
- The Sandra Bullock movie The Net (1995) is built around this trope. They do attempt to justify her losing her identity by computer hacking. She led an almost solitary existence where most of her acquaintances were online. Her only family was her mother who had Alzheimer's. She meets a man on vacation who seduces her and steals her identification, then signs a different name on a computer pad so she can get tickets home. Basically if the bad guys had targeted anybody else, their evil scheme wouldn't have worked.
- Averted in the 2007 Transformers movie, where the Decepticons can only access the US military's defense network by directly hacking the mainframe at the base in Qatar or the CONUS mainframe on Air Force One.
- In Short Circuit 2, Johnny 5 replaced his shoulder-mounted laser with a radio that can hack things. He uses it to shut down cars and pilot a model airplane. However, in the last few minutes of the movie where the villain is escaping in a boat, Johnny 5 tries to use it on the boat, but it doesn't work.
- The laser got replaced by a 'utility pack'. This troper thought the transmitter - or whatever it was - had always been on Johnny's head in both movies. As for the end of the movie, well... Johnny was pretty messed up by that point and running out of power. Moments later, he uses the crane to get high enough to play Tarzan.
- Untraceable, the source of the quote. Apart from car-hacking, the villain also sets up a system where footage of whatever victim he's caught is streamed live to the internet, and the more views it gets, the closer the trap they're caught in comes to killing them. 'Cause New Media Are Evil.
- Averted in the first Mission Impossible movie: the CIA terminal containing the information Ethan needs to steal is completely isolated, so getting said information requires an elaborate distraction to allow Ethan and crew access to the ductwork of the building so he can infiltrate the room the terminal is in.
- In High School Musical one of the "brains" uses her laptop to hack the school's electrical grid, disabling power everywhere except the theater, so that Troy and Gabriela can make their callback at the climax of the show (movie or stage).
- In Eagle Eye, the Voice With An Internet Connection who guides the protagonists, (ab)uses the fact that Everything Is Online to control every bit of electric machinery to aid the protagonists in their tasks. Traffic lights, security cameras, metros, mobile phones, electronic billboards, everything can be manipulated. Even construction cranes. And the movie, via timestamps on computers, shows it takes place in the distant future of January 2009.
- In the movie's defense, it went to great lengths to show that the manipulated items were state-of-the-art online devices.
- Subverted in the fact that that Agent Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton), thrown by the fact that cameras keep conveniently going on line, seeks out the non-Netted close-captioned cameras of a small business store.
Literature
- Also justified in the Doctor Who novels System Shock and Millennium Shock, in which the Big Bad has spent years planting alien microchips in all kinds of things, precisely so they can do this. Perhaps this is why Mickey in "World War III" is able to launch a missile from his computer with a single password...
- Also in Doctor Who, in "Dalek", the Dalek not only manages to download the entire Internet within mere seconds from a random terminal in an Elaborate Underground Base, it also succeeds in draining the entire Eastern United States of electricity within these same mere seconds.
- Although that's not a computer, it's a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, and the base it's in is run by the guy who says he owns the internet, it should still be limited by its interface, which was a computer.
Western Animation
- This trope is used egregiously in The Magic School Bus, where a computer can raise and lower the flag, make coffee, and open doors. This wouldn't have been so bad, except this was the episode in which they showed how computers "worked".
- It would be possible to make a computer do any or all of those things, but not out of the box.
- The most wonderful example of this would be Inspector Gadget's niece Penny's Computer Book. In a time when the first laptop computers were just being released, hers could break into anything to help her Uncle Gadget.
- Fairly Odd Parents has Timmy often using the internet as an excuse for where/how he gets the things he wishes for. Including heat vision. And of course his parents buy it.
- Also applies to XANA's attacks in Code Lyoko, although this is partially explained away — the inky black "spectres" are apparently capable of wiring up any electronic device, inanimate object, or even human being, as desired.
- In an episode of the old Mega Man cartoon, a virus causes everything to work for Dr. Wily. Even phone cords. And toasters. And sofas. In fact, the objects he controls act in ways they couldn't possibly in normal life, like street lamps strangling people.
- Justified in Futurama: Mom had designed things that way so that she could eventually Take Over The World.
- On the Y2K Halloween episode of The Simpsons, Homer's workstation being non Y 2 K compliant causes everything to rebel, including pacemakers, electric shavers and cartons of milk.
- In the cartoon series The Batman, a Digital Advanced Villain Emulator(D.A.V.E) program "escapes" through the power cord of his computer, into a manufacturing factory, knocks out a worker by firing electricity through the keyboard and then reprograms the factory to build him a body.
- In Static Shock, a disgruntled technician builds a helmet that allows her to uplink her consciousness to the Internet in the form of the ultimate worm virus. Not only can she connect to things that shouldn't be online, she can take anything that has a computer in it and use that fact to access functions the computer itself couldn't, such as driving cars by accessing "the onboard computer systems", which should really just consist of a GPS or something. Now, given that she chose to pull this gimmick against an electricity-themed hero and his supergenius sidekick, she doesn't last very long - she gets taken out with antivirus software which winds up feeding back through the helmet and pretty much rendering her catatonic. The repercussions are never discussed.
Video Games
- The basic premise of Mega Man Battle Network. In some optional missions, escaped viruses make their way into action figures and electronic keyboards.
- The premise of Megaman NT Warrior, the anime version of the above game series, is naturally founded upon this trope as well.
- Also occaisionally averted. While many unlikely things are connected to the internet such as Mayl's piano & Myuki's mirror (which may just be P Cs designed to look like these things), there are many devices like cars, T Vs, vending machines & major public works like the water treatment plant that are not online, despite being computer controlled & must be jacked into manually.
- The trope continues in the Spin Off, Mega Man Star Force.
- Taken to ridiculous extremes in the Sega CD game Panic!, where a computer virus infects the World Central Network, and every machine in the world, including vending machines, vehicles, elevators, and countless other objects, starts going haywire in indescribably bizarre ways. This makes substantially more sense than the rest of the game.
- Averted in Deus Ex, Helios has very little power through his hacking, at most he is able to "change some codes and turn out a couple lights", his real power from that people willingly follow him as an alternative to to the corrupt leaders currently in power. Helios can also play with the security systems, but he IS directly interfaced with them
- Played straight to a degree as well There is some code of the Daedalus AI on every communication device on Earth.
- Splinter Cell: Double Agent has a sequence where a character hacks into some slot machines and makes them start spewing money as a distraction.
- To make it worse, those slot machines are on a cruise ship at sea.
- However in the previous Splinter Cell games Sam Fisher is often used to gain direct access to isolated data.
Tabletop RPG
- In Champions, every motor vehicle in Millenium City is remotely controlled by a central computer. They never really discuss the implications of this.
Real Life
- Truth In Television: Far too many companies have products with Internet access and plenty more on the way. You can get a refrigerator with Internet access, why anyone would want this is beyond belief. They claim it is for recipes and such, but a laptop you can carry into the kitchen or such makes far more sense.
- Automobiles currently use things like OnStar. In the future they are planning to have the ability for someone to reduce the maximum speed you can drive to 10 MPH if it is stolen. Just wait for someone to hack that and cause thousands of cars to do this at once...
- Bill Gates has gone on record saying that Microsoft Vista is to be the next step in putting everything online. He is intending Windows to handle just about everything in your life, including lights, television, and controlling it from your car as you drive up.
- Actually, it's even worse: networked printers, copiers, webcams, hard disks, Tivoes, set-top boxes and other gadgets with an Ethernet jack nowadays are fully-fledged computers. The software on these devices is usually based on Linux or Windows CE, hacked together half-assedly with no thought given to security, and there is no update mechanism. This makes them very useful for attackers, as they are easily hacked and then they have control over a computer on your network.
- Networked devices that have no reason for being that way were recently pointed out as a massive security problem in office environments, as in this case of a net-enabled, self-updating ''coffee maker'' (?!?). Not only can a sufficiently grief-minded hacker execute a "denial of coffee attack" by remotely screwing with the boiler temperature or the grounds:water ratios, but the control program has to be run on an XP box somewhere on the coffee maker's LAN, which effectively opens a back door onto that machine, and from there into the entire network. Oops!
- A hilarious example of this trope's effects in action, even titled We Can Thank Hollywood And “Hacker” Films For This.
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