The concept of hacking transcends the technology of any given era, which explains why, years later, hackers continue to turn to film comparisons to explain their work. When University of Michigan researchers exploited a chip’s electrical leakage to hide a backdoor inside in 2016, they called it “out of the matrix.” When security researcher Joanna Rutkowska showed she could confine a victim’s computer within an invisible layer of software under her control, she called it a “blue pill” attack.
“I can use the matrix To explain, well, this is the woman in the red dress that everyone sees, but the hacker can see the code that makes that woman and change the color of her dress,” says Katie Mousoris, a famous security researcher and CEO of Luta Security.” You didn’t mean to allow it, it’s possible because I can examine what’s really going on beneath the surface.”
the majority, the matrix pick up the Feeling About piracy, says Dai Zuffy, who first saw the movie when he was a 19-year-old college student. A year later, he was working as a systems administrator at a high-end social media company called SuperFamilies.com, which had a few additional Sun Microsystems workstations lying around. One Friday he asked if he could take a home to fiddle with—and found a memory corruption vulnerability in his programming that he had spent an entire spring break learning to exploit.
When he finally succeeded, Dai Zovi first experienced what it felt like to take over an entire piece of code with a technology he invented, letting him do whatever he wanted. He compares that to when Neo jumps into Agent Smith’s body, blows it up, then silently stands in place while the world subtly curves around him. “It does this flex, and the screen kind of bubbles, like it’s wrapping space-time,” says Dai Zuffy. “When you write your first exploit — or the hundred or the thousand — you feel that flexible. You want to play it a million times once you master it, to get that feeling of power and ability.”
Hackers don’t use superpowers in our reality yet. But as networked computers permeate more and more physical things—our cars, our home appliances, and even critical infrastructure like electrical networks, water supply systems, and manufacturing—modern life is becoming more like the matrix of all the time. The ability to control these computer systems becomes a skill that can change the real world.
Disconnecting from that pervasive computing is, for most of us, really no longer an option. Better, perhaps, put on your glowing coat, dive into the digital world, and start bending some spoons.
This article appears in the December 2021 / January 2022 issue. subscribe now.
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