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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 reality, physical records like paper birth certificates and driver licenses are always null and void if the computers can't find a digital copy - and physical records are simple enough to destroy. Your friends and family will apparently forget you were ever born if the e-records are deleted - and they would be unable to protect you if the authorities were convinced you are a criminal and/or a terrorist. Less often, this is justified because 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.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
- 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.
- However, this is somewhat justified in that the series is set in a parallel universe where the internet effectively connects to a Spirit World. Considering that the first scene depicts someone uploading their consciousness to the internet by committing suicide, conventional electrical gadgets being connected to the internet isn't far-fetched by comparison.
- 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).
- Given that SEELE paid for the Geofront to be built in the first place, its entirely possible that they installed their own backdoor hard lines.
- 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!"
- Ghost In The Shell justifies this trope as making sense in a world where almost everyone you meet has a cybernetic implant connecting their brain wirelessly to the internet. Shown most prominently when the Laughing Man on more then one occasion hacks not only cameras but peoples visual inputs to replace his face with his two dimensional logo. In a Mind Screw moment people will even remember and swear that the logo is the real face.
- However the trope is averted when logical. In the aforementioned Laughing Man incident, two homeless guys without any cybernetics are not effected. Not that they see particularly much. The military uses "autistic mode" meaning they turn off their wireless capability. Likewise certain facilities and networks are not connected to the broader net, forcing Section 9 to resort to more direct methods fairly often.
- Nicely Averted in Cannon God Exaxxion; though each Artificial Human can hack into things like robots and space battle ships, they have to assimilate them with Nanomachines to do it.
- Real Drive has this, although there are still some people without a cybernetic implant.
Films
- 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, so the Terminator infects stuff with remote-control Nanomachines — and 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.
- Which part of the above explains how 'infecting' a truck will allow you to press the gas pedal remotely?
- 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 have a "fire sale"; communications, water, power, all are taken down in sequence. They even give a jet pilot false orders to kill Mc Clane. Of course, they are unable to remotely access the power grid and have to physically break into a power hub and later, the U.S. Magical Database.
- 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 well built around this trope. Angela Bennett led a
n almost completely solitary existence where most of her acquaintances were online. Her only living family was her mother - who had Alzheimer's. She meets a man on vacation who seduces her based on her chatroom logs and steals her identification, then is forced to sign a different name on a computer pad so she can get tickets home. They then erase her identity by hacking public records. If the bad guys had targeted anybody else, their evil scheme wouldn't have worked. Several of her friends come to her aid, but they decoy the first one's plane into a smokestack by hacking his GPS, the second is hospitalized and then overdosed with insulin when they hack the hospital, and a third is just shot. Of course, the whole thing is run by Bill Gates Jeff Gregg, a software billionaire who is making millions off his faster, more efficient browser which provides better access to the internet "hackproof" security system - which contains a backdoor.
- 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. Then again, in the movie all modern electronics are based on Megatron's systems, and they apparently didn't realize it.
- This is justified, however, because software is more important than hardware for communication. This tropers computer has a ext3 partition which the linux OS can access but windows can't even see, despite being on the same drive. Having two identical pieces of hardware running different OS's communicate is a non-trivial task.
- 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 by triggering their burglar alarms and pilot remote controlled model airplanes. 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 because it is not radio controlled.
- 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.
- That's correct; in the first movie, he uses the transmitter in his head to keep turning on the TV after his Friend To All Living Things companion keeps shutting it off, as well as to detect when Nova's goons are close. In the second movie, he also uses it to commandeer a billboard to act as cue cards for his creator during his date with the token girl.
- 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 with Agent Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton) who, thrown by the fact that cameras keep conveniently going online, seeks out the closed-circuit cameras of a small business store.
- The Voice With an Internet Connection can even cause a power pylon to drop its wires on a target and electrocute him — despite the lack of any apparent mechanical means, online or otherwise, in place for the purpose.
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.
- In Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist's motorcycle is rendered inert by a computer virus. ("Asherah's possessed his bike.") Perhaps justified by the book's setting in a futuristic cyberpunk world, since there's already lots of work going into the idea of making the electronic engine-management system of cars remotely accessible, so that it can be disabled in the event of theft, or stopped by the police without the need for risky manoeuvres. More creative uses are left as an exercise for the student...
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.
- Season 7 introduced us to the "CIP device", a widget somewhat resembling a PCI modem, which had the power to hack into air traffic control transmissions, remote control aircraft, cause chemical plants to go critical, and cause general havoc nationwide.
- 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 symbiotic Nanomachines 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.
- In the Inspector Morse episode 'Masonic Mysteries', the villain is able to frame Morse by hacking into the police computer and altering his records. And he does all this from a prison terminal. After doing a computer course at prison.
- The Cylons of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica use this trope a lot. In some cases it's justified as in the miniseries where the Colonies have allowed a Cylon infiltrator to write their military coding. In the second season where the Galactica's computers are networked, the Colonials must have added about a billion unsecured Bluetooth connections set to default access to the network.
- Further partially justified in that, in order to synchronize the jump drives of all the other ships in the fleet, it is explicitly shown that the Galactica has to maintain wireless connections with all of them. For a while, the Cylons continually tried to hack the Galactica when it was preparing to coordinate a fleet jump.
- John Henry from The Sarah Connor Chronicles is apparently able to control lights, elevators, and normal doors through the Internet.
- Justified: In the Zeira Corp. building, we're explicitly told that he's been given control. It's not much of a stretch to assume the systems are electronically controllable. The only other time we see him do this, it's remotely to Catherine Weaver's home, who, as president of Zeira Corp (and a Terminator), probably has fully-integrated electronic controls there as well.
Tabletop Games
- In Champions, every motor vehicle in Millenium City is remotely controlled by a central computer. They never really discuss the implications of this.
- Shadowrun is generally one of the usual suspects, though it does avert the trope on occasion. In 3rd edition, extra-sensitive systems were often off-line or in a closed-circuit system, though "extra-sensitive" may or may not include the security of top-secret megacorp research labs. 4th edition still takes the cake: almost all computers rely on wireless technology, meaning you don't even need a physical connection to your target to wreak havoc. Forget people's cars, start thinking about people's cyberware, which may include things like eyes or even the connection between their brain and their somatic nervous system.
- Actually, further supplements mention that alot of cyberwear is NOT wireless (like the aforementioned somatic system upgrades), and the few that are tend to have such weak signal you'd need to be humping the person's cyberlimb to be close enough to hack it. A later change in rules made it impossible to hack limbs themselves. Also, important or critical systems may not have wireless nodes at all, or have the range of said node limited by wireless-impeding means like Wireless absorbent paint, insulation and jammers.
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. Even the Mafia operates online.
- 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 spiritual successor, 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, averting this was the whole reason for Third Echelon's existence: Sam Fisher is only sent in to infiltrate the facilities that can't be breached by electronic means.
- Major plot point in Dot Hack games, both the original and GU series: The first game has the 8 Phases (and the destruction thereof) along with Morganna to create such a chaos in the internet that it crashes the stock market. Also, it temporarily cripples the hospital where some of the coma victims were treated. In GU, this gets even worse, as Cubia's threat is causing simultaneous worldwide nuclear reactor meltdowns. This is Twenty Minutes Into The Future, but still...
- Dreamfall: The Longest Journey takes place in a future in which, indeed, pretty much everything is online. The mysterious network failures known as "The Static" have even resulted in fatal car accidents, and, indeed, one the things you get hack during the game is a car.
- A possible aversion or just playing it straight occurs depending on how you parse it in Mass Effect. The various offensive hacking useable in combat effects systems that should not only be operated offline to avoid this exact thing(like say guns and shields)but also should be encrypted to prevent such things. The aversion would come if the omni-tool was using its nanotics and an induction system limited by line of sight EM radiation. Given how much work the designers put into justifying everything then this isn't as far fetched as one would think. Of course none of that explains how you can hack someones nervous system...
- Averted at least once in Knights Of The Old Republic 2. On Telos, while doing the light-side path, the player has to extract incriminating evidence from a corporate databank. After talking to an employee of that company, you find out that the system is closed off from the outside so it can't be sliced. Instead you need someone who can physically infiltrate the company's HQ and extract the data from there.
Web Comics
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.
- Possible, yes, but pointless. You would have to essentially mod the computer and have it running all the time. Also some of the things they were using the computer for were either a) probably already programmable, like the coffee maker, or b) something you'd want a human to handle anyway for safety's sake, like locking/unlocking doors or turning on the sprinklers.
- 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.
- What makes this more fantastical is that she was able to do this before anything that could be called the Internet existed. Through radio and microwave hacking? Or electric telepathy?
- 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.
- Technically, it was a box attached to some cables in a power station. And he controlled all those appliances all at the same time with just a joystick.
- 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.
- For being about a titular electrokinetic, this show Did Not Do The Research; Virgil Hawkins is somehow able to play C Ds by sticking his finger in the hole and holding them to his ear.
- Acknowledged in ReBoot: Daemon can't infect systems that don't have a connection to the net. Interestingly, you can use Portals to access said systems.
- Averted in an episode of Batman The Animated Series where the Riddler tries to conceal his identity by erasing all online records of himself. Batman notes that there are plenty of hard records which will have to be destroyed in order to make the process thorough, and sure enough, the Riddler sends some of his thugs to city hall to destroy the records of him there.
Real Life
- 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!
- Even the power grid is online. And using default or no passwords.
- A hilarious example of this trope's effects in action, even titled We Can Thank Hollywood And "Hacker" Films For This.
- MIT's web enabled drink machines, and others along those lines
- Then there was the Polish kid who modified a TV remote to hack into the Lodz train system and control it.
- There are also actually some limited versions of this technology in existence now, or under research, but they are usually passive in nature. EMESCAT systems, which have existed since the Cold War, are designed to remotely gather information (such as, say, reading what's on your CRT computer monitor) from the electromagnetic radiation given off by a computer. This generally takes the form of a sensitive EM sensor near the computer in question, such as in a van across the street, or the other side of a hotel wall. Superconducting Quantum Interface Devices (also called SQUI Ds), are similar devices that are currently (mostly?) theoretical. These latter would generally depend on direct physical connections to the computer, but ranged versions have been proposed.
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