The best TV series about hackers and carders "Mr. Robot"

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  • 1. Best Carder TV Show
  • 2. The plot of the series "Mr. Robot"
  • 3. Facts about the TV series "Mr. Robot"
  • 4. Easter eggs in Mr. Robot
We have already talked about the best films about hackers and carders. Today there will be a continuation in a sense. In today's article we will focus on the best TV series about hackers and carders, the series "Mr. Robot".

Best Carder TV Show
Rave reviews for “Mr. Robot "were heard from all directions even before he received two Golden Globes. Surprisingly, how did a rather dark drama about the world of hackers manage to attract such a wide audience? It's 2018 and season 3 is in full swing. We will not spoil you and talk about the hacking fun that accompanied previous seasons.

On July 14, 2016, episode 1 of the second season of the series “Mr. Robot ”(and the creators of the series posted the first half of this double episode on Twitter three days earlier). As always, fans immediately began to carefully study everything that was shown on the heroes' computer screens. And, as always, they weren't disappointed. On the contrary, this time the catch turned out to be much better.

That's one of the characters (Darlene) from your computer it will activate a famous cryptographer Cryptowall. If anyone does not know, this cryptolocker was the most popular ransomware among hackers: over the past three years, it caused a loss of $ 18 million.

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Darlene uses the Social-Engineering Toolkit (SET) to create attack scripts and tries to add a Cryptowall cryptolocker as a payload. If anyone has not heard of the SocialEngineering Toolkit, this is a fairly well-known and popular utility among hackers. As you can see, all the commands on the screen are as close to reality as possible.

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And here is a snippet when Darlene attacked the bank's computers. They show a funny picture on the monitor and ask for a ransom.

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In fact, rarely when hackers manage to occupy all screens with their screensaver so effectively, and the amount that attackers want ($ 6 million) is several times higher than the modest $ 400-1500 that attackers usually ask for. But we must not forget that "Mister Robot" is primarily a feature film, and this genre requires artistic exaggeration.

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However, we are not done with the analysis of this attack yet - this time the directors of the series have prepared something special for us.
In the first season, all the IP addresses shown on the screen were fake. Fans of the series complained when they saw that parts of the IP address exceed the maximum possible number of 255. Given the general level of realism, the authors probably did this on purpose - so that no one wanted to burst into these addresses with their scanners.

The IP addresses 192.251.68.254 and 192.251.68.239 that appear on Darlene's screen in the first episode of the second season are no longer fake. You can try to drive into the address bar of the browser and see the screensaver of the Winlocker's admin panel and a countdown clock that counts down 24 hours.
But if you look closely, it becomes clear that this is of course bullshit - in the source code of the script web_analytics.js, which is tied to the page, it is honestly written “USA Network” (the name of the TV channel on which the series is shown) and “Mr. Robot: S2 Easter Egg Sites: Ransomware: Home ”(Easter eggs for the second season of Mr. Robot).

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But do not think that the creators of the series missed something and forgot to remove their traces from the page code. On the contrary - for the especially curious, something interesting was hidden here. Take a closer look below and you will see a long string encrypted in Base64. If you decipher the string, you will receive a message - a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Here is a translation of the phrase: "I believe that the institution of banks is more dangerous than an armed army".
If the people of the United States give the opportunity to private banks to manage the issue of currency, banks and large corporations run by bankers will take away all their property from people until their children wake up homeless on the land once conquered by their ancestors".

Well, Jefferson's thought fits very well with the main theme of the show. Fighting the banking system and inequality.

The plot of the series "Mr. Robot"
If you are not unfamiliar with the plot of the television series, I will devote a couple of minutes to the story about what "Mr. Robot" is. In general, this is almost an ordinary cyberpunk story: the main character (Elliot) works in the office at work during the day, and at night he is a hacker. But unlike Neo from the popular movie "The Matrix", he does not know how to crack the Matrix, bend spoons with his gaze and hold bullets. His superpower looks much more believable: he returns home, throws off the hood from his head, sits down at the keyboard and starts typing commands in the console.

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The amount of personal information that each person leaves on the Internet makes it possible for the protagonist to find out more about him than the famous Sherlock Holmes would have learned by studying the details of clothes. This story finds a lively response from the audience: even if an ordinary TV viewer does not understand the commands flashing on the monitor screens, he remembers that it is just as easy to get full access to his data.

The series is set in today's New York, but the world around is a little caricatured. The corporation in which the protagonist works is engaged in information security and is called Allsafe, which can be translated into Russian approximately as "Under protection"; Allsafe's main client is E Corp, hated by Eliot, which he refers to as Evil Corp. Together with the inner monologues of Elliot, which accompany the viewer throughout the entire television series, it seems that this is not a film at all, but a comic book that has come to life.

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And all this is combined with a very believable hack depicted. In a way, "Mr. Robot" is "Doctor House" about hackers. Yes, extremely rare medical cases follow one another at House, but they are all real. Much the same with the hacks in "Mr. Robot": the plots of certain episodes from the first season did coincide with the headlines.

Mister Robot Facts
The authors of the television series rightly reasoned that if the heroes look at the monitors with a very important look and philosophize about the fate of humanity, then the screens should not show nonsense and nonsense, otherwise all the pathos can break in the eyes of an informed viewer (and there are more and more of them every season).
So the show has a "realism man" called Michael Buzzel. Since 1990, Michael has worked as a detective in the police cybercrime department. Then Buzzel transferred to the FBI, and after ten years of a career in the organs he set out to seek his fortune in Hollywood.

Thanks to the work of Michael Buzzel, you can see on the screen:
  • Kali Linux;
  • Raspberry Pi;
  • Secure mail ProtonMail;
  • The already mentioned Social-Engineering Toolkit;
  • Metasploit and Meterpreter;
  • Popular password brute-force John the Ripper;
  • The Shellshock exploit, which made a lot of noise;
  • Bluetooth scanners btscanner and bluesniff;
  • Root Android using SuperSU and install FlexiSPY;
  • Hacking a car via CAN bus.
  • The real vulnerability of Onity door locks.
  • Steganography in sound files using DeepSound.
  • Police database CLEAR.
and many other tools, which can be listed for a long time.

The film even shows real hacker devices: one of the characters was used to intercept radio signals, the other (Tastic RFID Thief) - to remotely read RFID.

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The creators of the series were inspired, among other things, by real events, such as the "Arab Spring" or the hacking of the Iranian uranium enrichment plant by the US special services. The video messages from the hacker group fsociety are an allusion to the message of "Anonymous" of the Church of Scientology. They did not forget about the Sony rootkits, and about the story with Ashley Madison (in order to have time to include it in the script, one of the episodes even had to be delayed).

Here's another cool example. In one scene, Elliot pretends to fend off a DDoS attack, but in reality he is installing a rootkit on the computer. The viewer who understands what is happening in the console will suspect something before the rootkit plays in the plot.

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And that's not to mention all sorts of little things like matching IP addresses in different scenes or plausible-looking network logs. What happens on computer screens sometimes even emphasizes the personality of the characters:
Elliot, for example, runs GNOME (sometimes LXDE), while his rival Tyrell runs KDE. The creators of the series made sure that this was the case in any scene where one of them is seen using the graphical shell.

Well, social engineering is generally sacred. It is combined with acting and TV screen at times better than the console, and this could not pass by the writers. Recall, for example, the episodes where Elliot on the phone pretends to be a tech support employee or pretends to be an eccentric millionaire in front of a data center employee. This is both a masterful portrayal of hacker tricks and scenes that catch the viewer.

Easter eggs in "Mr. Robot"
Something for Movie Lovers Mister Robot has Easter Eggs not only for hackers, but also for avid moviegoers. If you wish, you can see allusions to "A Clockwork Orange", "The Godfather" and other famous films. Sometimes these are direct references (for example, Darlene's glasses with hearts are directly taken from Kubrick's "Lolita"), sometimes only the composition of the frame or some other technique is quoted. In one of the scenes dedicated to the hero's past, an advertisement for "Pulp Fiction" flashes in the newspaper. They say the episode had to be sent to Tarantino for approval to include this episode. Well, about the plot twist in the first season, which was boldly borrowed from "Fight Club", is out of the question.

"Mr. Robot" is, of course, not the first time that realistic console commands are beautifully shown in movies. It is possible that the creators were inspired by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She also did something with Nmap on her MacBook, and director David Fincher was once again praised for the amazingly detailed details in this regard. But one thing - Nmap in passing, another thing - Kali, SET and Metasploit in almost every episode, large and legible. The difference is roughly like that between the cautious bed scene
in a family movie and a Brazzers motion picture.

The "Easter egg" mentioned at the beginning of the article seems to be only one of a whole series. An equally interesting story happened after the release of the trailer for the second season of "Mr. Robot" in mid-May 2016 (a month before its showing). Another secret was hidden in the trailer, or rather "the beginning of the path". You can watch the trailer at the end of the article.
A glimpse of a US phone number is shown in one of the frames. Someone decided to call him and heard a voice on the answering machine. A voice says, “Thank you for calling E Corp. Support. Due to recent events, we are receiving an unusually high number of calls. To avoid waiting on the line, you can use our website at www… ”. At this, the message ends, there is a noise, and then another voice says: "Such a bright light is impossible without darkness," and then a series of signals.

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The phrase about light and darkness is a quote from Francis Bacon. Having cooperated through Reddit, fans of the series soon realized that Bacon was here for a reason. If you write the signals in binary form, and then decode them using the Bacon cipher, you get the line FSOCDOTSH, that is, fsoc.sh, and this is a valid site URL.

On the main page of fsoc.sh, there is a spinning eye with numbers and letters around it: 4C4F4F4B205550. That's right, it's a hexadecimal code! We translate into ASCII and get the words LOOK UP - "look up". Directly above the eye - a blinking cursor. If we translate its blinking into Morse code, then the phrase LEAVE ME HERE - "leave me here" will be released. We insert it into the line under the eye - and you're done! We have access to the system.
The first 509 people who followed this path received a hoodie with the symbols of the series, the rest can indulge in a fake operating system running inside the browser. It contains all sorts of additional materials to "Mr. Robot" and even the game "Snake". It is also suggested that you leave your email address to "join the ranks of fsociety."

It is difficult to predict how far the next path will take spectators / players, but there will be more riddles, no doubt. And you have a chance to try to find them and solve them first.

You can find and watch the series "Mr. Robot" here. We will tell you about the third season of the best series about hackers "Mr. Robot" in a separate article.

Season 2 Trailer
 
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