The Reality of Hacking
Media
Here we have a classic example of cliche "Hacking" tropes in media, from the movie "Independence Day". Often there is this concept of bypassing some sort of firewall and uploading something called a virus to a mainframe. However, in reality this concept is relatively absurd. You don't just upload a virus to some mainframe and let it do its magic
This example is one of my favorites. It is a scene from an episode of "NCIS" where two characters notice they are getting hacked and actively fight to try to prevent this. Methods of defense include making a bunch of things pop on screen really fast, typing gibberish at lightning fast speed, and both of them typing at the same time on the same keyboard. It doesn't take someone who is good with computers to understand that typing is not a piano duet, and two people at once is not more effective.
I am almost at a loss for words with this example. The pictures come from the movie "Swordfish" featuring Hugh Jackman. For some reason in this movie they represented hacking as piecing together a bunch of little cubes into one big cubes. Not to mention that there are like 18 screens in front of him, and amount that no human would ever be able to make affective use of.
Based on the above examples, not to mention the news stories of secret nameless 'organizations' of hacktivists such as anonymous, one might get the impression that hacking is quite glamorous and exciting. Just from looking at the examples from the movies and television shows discussed, hacking is almost always depicted as the physical activity, and the faster you type the better you are doing at the hacking. Furthermore, it is very common in media for hackers to be surrounded with cool gear, and to be very mysterious. However, this is very far from the reality of the situation.
Reality
Here in this example from an article on gizmodo.com, we see a much more accurate representation of what hacking looks like. In this example the person is testing security of a home deployed web server.
In this example, also from gizmodo.com, another accurate example of hacking is shown. The person in this example is likely gathering server data.
