Week 8 – Journal Entry

After watching this video of an ethical hacker analyzing the 12 movie scenes presented to her, the video presents something that I’ve had a problem in how Hollywood depicts and other media influence our understanding about cybersecurity. When I started interning for cybersecurity a couple years ago I assumed that cybersecurity was going to be the same as how it was depicted in many shows and movies, some which were shown in this video with constant moving visuals and different GUI’s present when analyzing detections. After just a few weeks I realized it was nothing like that. Yes, while some of these show a level of accuracy to how breaches can happen and the process to trying to get most of that information, the media poses this image that hacking is something that can be done with just a click of a few buttons when in reality it’s extremely time consuming. They try to make it seem like hackers do all the work in order to wrongfully gain access, but in reality it’s the work of victims that allow hackers to target them by lacking the privacy and security necessary when being on the Internet.