"They've detected the trojan and they're throwing up firewalls!" - </scorpion>
:zomgwtfbbq: :rofl:
Normally, I don't correct the bad science and/or technology in shows that my wife enjoys. Tonight, I had to speak up.
A FIREWALL IS ALREADY ON. WE DO NOT TURN ON FIREWALLS WHEN INTRUSIONS ARE DETECTED. THEY ARE ALREADY ON TO STOP THOSE STUPID INTRUSIONS.
Also, I'm pretty sure that a military vessel would have a self-contained network that does NOT have an easily hackable back door.
Can't wait for CSI: Cyber to start in a few weeks... :XD:
I am not sure I am even going to try watching the CSI: Cyber show as I am sure it will be unbearable lol.
OK. I thought you were joking about CSI: Cyber. Now I am horrified, and interested all at once.
-Otanx
I plan to watch at least one episode. Trolling it looks like it might be a fun way to do additional research into the field of network security.
I can't wait to see them bust down the door on a "Windows Technical Support" call center, guns a-blazing as they shut DOWN those haxxorz! Or see them swing into action against an INTERNATIONAL spammer... with a murderous secret!
:-\ HENCHMAN: I want out, boss. I'm tired of sending out spam about Oprah's latest weight loss secret.
>:D SPAMMER: What do you mean? Am I not paying you enough?
:-\ HENCHMAN: It's not that, it's that I found out Oprah hasn't lost any weight. It's all a scam. I mean, if it were true, our spam would be a good thing, but... I just can't take the dishonesty!
>:D SPAMMER: Well... all right... but you know my rules... total silence... I can't afford to have the authorities know my IP address.
:-\ HENCHMAN: I'll keep quiet, sure.
>:D SPAMMER: Good.
( :-\ HENCHMAN leaves...)
>:D SPAMMER: (places call on cell phone) Hello, Guido? I have the name of someone that I want you to make sure maintains... total silence...
(Cue another The Who song for the theme...)
Because that's EXACTLY how spammers operate! Maybe!
I think it might be my new favorite show, for all the wrong reasons...
:steamtroll:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-WH14E3Wk0
I'm laughing quite heartily. :lol:
I know there's a push from the UK and US government to put an end to encryption by non-governmental entities, and I already see some of that in the preview. "Their money is untraceable!" Yeah, right... and 96% of the Internet being dark and mysterious? How about 96% of the internet being Cisco web pages I can never find when I need them...
Scene by scene...
"Facial recognition on our mystery woman" because all the facial recognition software looks like that and never has a blank screen while it calculates matches... and all the faces are really well-done, too, not a mug shot in them.
"You're not going to find her in any database" O RLY? How about Google Images? Did you try there? DID ANYONE USE GOOGLE BEFORE WRITING THIS EPISODE?
0:25, the fingerprint pattern match... more fast moving text on the side of a rapidly-developing image, when we all know it's more likely to see a "Processing..." progress bar. But that's standard CSI computer gee-whizzery. How about the new stuff?
"She opens their eyes to cyber-crime!" ZOMGWTFBBQ THERE IS A CYBER CRIME??? :zomgwtfbbq: Which proves that police officers should not be hunkered down in dimly-lit bunkers all day long. They lose touch with reality. I remember 20 years ago, my very first Nigerian Prince scam. There has been a cyber crime going on every since then, I have internets to help me to prove it.
Quick side note: I really do like Patricia Arquette as an actress. It's not her fault that she got thrust into this travesty. She's got no certs, no experience, so she'll take all this as given and deliver the best acting job she can do with the material she's given.
But the knife scene and the arm slash? What? Last time I got a cut like that on my arm was when I tried to both clear a jam in the copier AND change a toner cartridge.
"You tap a few keys and then you reduce the motive to a few digital bits..." Dude, I bet there were a few mouse-clicks in there and a little playing of Candy Crush while the PC spent some cycles compiling...
"The world has changed..." and then a shot of a chat room next to a video feed/embedded movie/flash animation of a young lady. SIN! TEMPTATION! EEEEVIL! :twisted:
Except that there's a million sites out there that do online video chat with all kinds of targets of unfettered sexual desires. Or fettered, if need be. This is the Internet. If there is anything, there is porn of it.
Speaking of which, look at the screen at 1:17... I think the "Donate" link along the top is the funniest. Stay hopeful, website, stay hopeful... one day, people who feel guilty about getting all their porn for free will one day chip in a few bucks to keep the site going. :rofl: Then the numbers for the categories, with "GAY" even sorted into "MALE" and "FEMALE".
OK, now for the part about the world only using 4% of the Internet. Is there some huge chunk of Internet that is being hidden somewhere? Is she referring to the IPv6 address space which, let's face it, hasn't really caught on? Is there an assumption that if a page doesn't have over a certain threshold of hits/day that it is not being "used"? What's the justification for the number here, because I would like to know...
"I work in the deep web, where the criminals are anonymous" Wait, anonymous as in members of the hacker group, anonymous as in people who frequent 4chan, or anonymous as in they don't use their actual name for an online persona? Because if it's the latter, there are a lot of non-criminals who are anonymous. Just sayin'.
"... money is untraceable..." Then go after the banks. Money laundering happens because of lax enforcement regimes at the high levels of finance, not because there is an Internet and SSL. If you want to trace the money, appoint someone to the SEC that actually *isn't* a tool of the big banks, and you'll bring their practices to light. Of course, it'll also shut down a lot of campaign contributions and may even deprive the world financial system of much-needed liquidity in times of crisis (the 2007-2008 liquidity crisis was eased considerably by money laundering transactions... criminal networks kept the global economy going during that time when interbank lending seized up). Or... is she talking about bitcoin? 'Cause that got hacked. It's totally traceable now.
"I think we need to assess your social vulnerability" IE, you idiot... you posted your phone number on your facebook page. Way to go, dumbass.
"There's a murder and a crime scene and there's a *virtual* suspect" Hold on there, ma'am... murders get committed by real people, so technically solving a murder by using a computer to track down clues isn't solving a cyber crime, it's more like using technology to solve a regular old-fashioned kind of crime.
"computer-animated chat bot" Have the writers never heard of Thailand, Morocco, Turkey, or other places in the world where many, many people in marginal financial circumstances will do literally ANYTHING to get enough money to keep from starving? My point being, who needs sophisticated coding when a ten dollar webcam in a Guatemala City apartment would do the same thing? Or maybe this goes to show how it's a twisted genius at work, seeing as how it's the same guy that wants people to donate for the porn after carefully sorting it into a variety of helpful categories.
Then we get the scene with the human lie detector business... that never works. Usually, the way someone knows that someone else is lying is because that first someone already has proof of some sort. If not, and that someone else is lying, the someone else usually gets very indignant, demands lawyers and the media, and throws up all kinds of verbal defenses to cover his ass. I taught for 16 years, believe me, I've seen liars in action.
"She shows you how the Internet can be so dangerous" Obviously, we need to put in traffic policing on all router interfaces. C:-) That will keep us safe.
"some of the clues are coming from the real world and some are coming from the cyber world" Got news for you... the cyber world is the real world, just ask the RIAA and anyone that got one of their nastygrams after downloading a Britney Spears MP3.
2:44 - a shot of an actual Tableau TD3. Nice touch. You're gonna read a hard drive. So why are they using just the cream spinach interface when they can get a session pumped out to a tablet or video screen? Oh wait, take that back... looks like they're using an older model of the TD3.
"We think there are things that are private that are not private" Or you could have just said that the NSA records everything and shares it with all police entities, but then that doesn't make for good television... I mean, who wants a show where Big Brother is watching you, even if he does solve a few violent crimes here and there?
2:55 a press conference about someone whose image got used inappropriately and without permission on the Internet? Get in line, lady. And it's a very, very long line. Say hi to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee while you're at it. Seriously, who would make such a thing press conference worthy?
3:05 - a heavily armed group of men swoop into a computer-laden lair... that is really scary. I'm not a fan of the militarization of the police in the USA. And if that guy was using young womens' images without permission, wouldn't he be using those of people under 18? If so, that's a federal crime, so those local cops best step aside for the Feds. I know a guy doing 10 years in federal prison because he slept with an underage student... and took a picture. That is child pornography, and it ain't no state or local crime.
And then they wrap things up.
My only question is, "Do I have enough time to spend on proper deconstruction of each one of these episodes?"
I think I want to make time, because the field of information security demands it.
The most recent "Fresh Off the Boat" featured a 1995 "Internet Computer" with a 28.8 modem that kept renegotiating speed. THAT is accuracy, I tell you!
Also, the show is like a Malcolm in the Middle with Asians. I'm having fun with it.
But, yeah, love that modem sound. A true classic.
Tonight is the big night! CSI-CYBER!
I can't wait see them show a visualization of data going across the wire. Sort of like when Brian Spilner hits the "NOS" button and we get to see it travel from the tank all the way out the exhaust... [emoji106]
My wife says I have to keep it zipped when I watch it tonight. She doesn't want to know where the flaws are.
4 MARCH 2015
Pilot episode of CSI: Cyber :banana:
OK, kid gets kidnapped and there's crazy noise on the baby monitor. Our Hero gets a text on the kidnapping while goofing off and that PDF file of the report opens up in a way that no PDF file has ever opened... quickly.
Why are foreign voices coming across the baby monitor? They got hacked. In the real world, there's a group of guys that hack them for sick fun, screaming obscenities across the Internet at the tots. In this world, they are much more... sinister!
Now we go to a poorly lit room with a zillion screens and some people in very casual clothes. Where are the cubicles? Dude, if I do any cyberinvestigating, I want at least three computers and between 6 and 9 monitors in my cube. All mine, not on some stupid wall where I can't make out details.
The big guy with a beard is socially awkward. Stereotype! Whee! And now we have a bad guy hacker that has to be a good guy, because that's how EVERY tiger team is formed!
Opening montage... lots of electricity looking stuff. Not one screen of PuTTY or a CMD prompt with a ping command running or even the ultra-slick graphics of ASDM or Orion... Now, as the commercials run, I have to wonder... let's assume that these guys can go all NSA on the US infrastructure and even dig into international routers and switches because of embedded holes in Cisco gear that they somehow have access to... let's also assume that they have such tight OPSEC that they don't tip the hand of the NSA to reveal the extent to which these network devices are compromised... even so, won't they hit the occasional glitch where a switch or circuit is down? Well, that does make for bad television so, OK, they won't get any "request timed out" problems.
Now Our Hero is doing old fashioned cop work, talking with the victims. Plenty of dramatic music tells us it's a sad situation. Now we have our Hackers doing forensic work... WHY are they allowed to touch the crime scene? At any rate, we get a plausible explanation that the baby cam was used to find a time to hit the joint, and we see the security system line was cut... so why didn't an alarm go off after the line got cut?
Now we see a kid playing games on a massive screen... CYBER GAMER!!! But, we ask him regular questions for regular cop work, although it's peppered with fade effects that are sure to be included in the next version of Microsoft Powerpoint.
The voices... Chinese, Japanese, German, Arabic... ALL THE BAD GUYS IN THE WORLD!!! because World War 2 isn't over, apparently... "the card could have recorded the kidnapping"... no duh, Sherlock! IT IS A RECORDER. Wow. Brilliant.
So we figure we have a team involved... brilliant stuff, that conclusion. But now all their stuff is confiscated and the mom is a suspect because she made a phone call and looked nervous about the DNA sample and breast feeding? Wow, way to send all kinds of subtle propaganda that resistance is futile and an admission of guilt...
The evidence room... all the devices are hooked up to hard drive forensics gear in a room that has massive cable runs to... nowhere? Where are all the server fans? There should be massive whirring and people making jokes about this being the best place to fart with cable runs like that... and direct sunlight coming into the otherwise dimly lit room? What, they want to die of severe screen glare? Onwards... let's look to see what we learn from all the devices on the backlit table... Personally, I'd have them all piled up in my cube or a laptop staging area, but that's just reality...
"All I got is green code here." Yes, because rapid beeps as the code dumps to the screen are a reason for all code to be green. The code is also listing in the wrong direction, scrolling *down* as it progresses, not *up*... and then, hey presto, we got us some RED code!!! Now, why a * in a line of code is malware and worthy of redness, but the rest of the stuff around that operator is green... that makes no sense to me. It's like the code is randomly colored, getting redder with each line, still scrolling the wrong direction. I lol'd.
And then the zoom-in on text suddenly scrolling the correct way with a "release malworm" in red. OMG H4X!
And the text is now on 20 big screens, scrolling idiotically, and the family are now revealed to be complete idiots for not having an AV program. A brief scan of her phone records reveals an affair with someone from a place that was obviously cached and ready to be zoomed in on.
No waiting for backup, good idea. Real good idea when going against a GANG. No worries, it's just one guy and he's got a baby. Turns out, it's the wrong kid. The promo for the episode indicated we'd be going after a baby-selling ring. No idea why they wouldn't be going after a child porn ring or a money laundering ring or a corporate espionage ring, since those tend to be more widespread... no, we go after people doing old fashioned crimes near The Internet of Hacked Things.
Now the guy that had the kid is tied to a chair and is getting the third degree. Why is he not screaming for a lawyer? Why is he not begging to not be shot? Why does he have the utmost composure, as if he intimately trusts the people questioning him to do him no harm at all? But, he admits to being something of a stalker and a purchaser of foreign goods.
Now that we have to figure out why the kidnappers would sell the wrong kid to our calm lug, and we get treated to a MOBILE VIDEO CONFERENCE CALL!!! It's big enough for six jumbotron screens, even though they don't all line up... I want to know who their video guy is, because that's simply amazing. Our static gear is a tenth the size of that rig, and it has to be set up way in advance for it to even have a chance of being useful. And why doesn't the convo sound like it's on a phone? Huh...
Diaper change? Whaaa? OK, evidence collection. OK, that's clever. But not cyber. It's regular stuff.
But we get a print and a mobile app gets a 100% match. Scary. The lady saying "we have plenty of ways to catch guys like you" is even scarier. I mean... are we supposed to be assured by this benign-sounding assertion that Big Brother watching us is for our own good?
So the lady and the former bad hacker cruise facebook-looking sites for info and then Our Hero, through superior logic, figures out EXACTLY where the baddies are located because there's no way that they baddies would ever do anything random... and then things get very confusing as a motorcycle sniper prevents the baddies from ever getting to a lawyer to talk about how their 4th Amendment rights got violated. And then the FBI dude shoots the sniper... who has burned-off prints...
And then we see burner phones, which is how the baddies got tracked by the sniper dude... except if those phones are off, they have no GPS (that I know of), so they won't be reporting off of any cell towers... and if they were reporting off of cell towers, those things are NOT the most accurate ways to track people. But, somehow, these cheapo Tracfones have the ability to run apps. No way... I have one of those phones, and, believe me, they don't run no apps...
We see the source of the voices and they're bidding on a baby, each in a different language. OK, major BS here. When people do business, they do it in English. English is the second language of choice, the lingua franca of the business world. And what in the world are they using currencies other than dollars or euros for? Who can convert Saudi currency easily? The yuan itself is nonconvertible in most markets... or why aren't these guys using bitcoin, for that matter? And why are they TALKING instead of texting or placing bids by typing them in? Talking is a GREAT way to leave an identifying voice print... Not my cuppa joe, if I'm a criminal concerned about covering my tracks. And if I was a big and powerful dude of enormous means, I wouldn't have an auction audible to the outside world: How about a separate channel, audible only to earpieces in the ears of those that need to hear it?
Nine jumbo screens of baby as we talk about the horrible irony of surveillance devices being used against us. Then a ludicrous translation of voices in AUDIO, instead of written form, and even the currency is translated into dollars. I lol'd. And this guy targets desperate parents? So why not Detroit? Or where there's po' folk that don't even have baby cameras? Oh, wait, that wouldn't be CYBER!!!
Big white hat hacker inspects code in a data center? Really? Most people do that in a cubicle. And then there's an order to shut down the baby camera operation. Should be easy. There weren't any servers or devices on, from the sound of things.
3-D holographic projections to show how our dead baddies were drug mules. What was the cost of that? Wouldn't an email have been cheaper? And more portable?
Kid plays video games and then hears voices... turn the camera company servers back on or the baby dies!!! Got news for him, he might get a false positive when they melt from not having fans... and now we find exactly where the griefer is because consoles can pinpoint bullies? Whaaaaat? So why isn't this technology used to round up all the 13-year-olds that spew profanity in online games?
Now, as far as human trafficking goes, most of it goes on in areas of high distress, like war zones. UN peacekeeping officers tend to wind up time and again as suspects in trafficking, but they tend to have immunity from prosecution in areas where they're stationed. That seems like a nice place to round up some kiddos. Drug dealers in Afghanistan accept kids under 8 as equal to US $20,000, which is a fourth of what these baddies were charging. Why target kids in the USA, and all over the USA, from the look of things? Sounds like an amateur operation. But, then, picking off kids on their way from Nepal to Mumbai isn't CYBER!!! so that's bad television, right?
Next scene, the FBI stormtroopers move in. Sure hope they got the right house... they toss in a camera to confirm (nice touch, although most of these operations just assume they've got the right house and barge on in). Good guy hacker has to go break into the crime ring's network while Our Hero questions a Russian-sounding punk.
The crime ring's workbench looks a little more believable, but the password is ridonkulous. And the cracking thereof is high comedy. First try, the guy gets in. Such luck, that the 16-character password is ALL NUMBERS. One non-alphanumeric key, and we have a short, unsatisfying episode.
To make sure this episode satisfies, we have a car chase and a car goes into a lake for a heroic rescue. I won't comment on whether or not the rescue was possible, because that's not my area of expertise. I'll leave that to the Mythbusters. Kid gets rescued, CPR works, and it's all smiles, thanks to the fact that the crime ring was a bunch of idiots that never heard of characters, let alone uppercase ones.
Happy endings in the poorly lit 00010101 Jump Street nerve center that looks nothing at all like what IT people normally get to work in. Is there no ergonomic adjustments team where they work? And why did they unscrew all the fluorescents? So many questions, I'm sure I'll find out in later episodes...
I didn't watch that show, but I'm pretty sure that this
QuoteYeah, right... and 96% of the Internet being dark and mysterious? How about 96% of the internet being Cisco web pages I can never find when I need them...
Is one of the best things I have ever read.
I knew it would be bad but I watched it anyway. Should have went with my gut and just went on to bed lol. Hey at least they weren't connecting an ethernet cable from a mid-air airplane to a laptop while driving a Ferrari 200MPH lol.
Quote from: Nerm on March 05, 2015, 07:51:57 AM
Hey at least they weren't connecting an ethernet cable from a mid-air airplane to a laptop while driving a Ferrari 200MPH lol.
After I saw that episode of scorpion, I ordered a fresh box of cat5e from monoprice to keep in the back of my car just in case. :mrgreen:
Quote from: ChestHair on March 05, 2015, 08:42:32 AM
Quote from: Nerm on March 05, 2015, 07:51:57 AM
Hey at least they weren't connecting an ethernet cable from a mid-air airplane to a laptop while driving a Ferrari 200MPH lol.
After I saw that episode of scorpion, I ordered a fresh box of cat5e from monoprice to keep in the back of my car just in case. :mrgreen:
:rofl:
OK, so here's how I imagine the real world would have dealt with the case...
911 call... cops head out to look things over... they probably find the existence of the boyfriend because of phone records... turns out, the affair guy is the culprit, they bring him in, get the baby back home, parents divorce.
Alternately, there is something skeezy going on with the baby monitors... the cyber guys use their 1337 5k!11z and trace it back to... China. Crap, there's nothing more we can do at this point, ma'am or sir, as appropriate.
I wasn't the only one that had a delicious time... http://threatpost.com/csi-cyber-we-watched-so-you-didnt-have-to/111440
I feel good that my reactions and observations match up with the above article. If I do this for all the episodes of the show this season, do I get a certification?
watching it now...
i like the screen pouring output..
first guy "its' all green code"
other guy "oh oh, red code"
and the red code says "releasing malware now"
.. lol
no haxor in their right mind would announce such directly in the code...
off to wathc more funnies....
That's how an IPS works. It searches for the string "malware" in the packet and then SHUTS IT DOWN.
what about the first transformers where they're 'listening' to the 'hacking' and say things like 'sounds like Chinese code' or something to that effect. I LOLed
I still get a chuckle whenever I recall the episode of Burn Notice where he had to pose as a hacker.
:steamtroll:
CSI: Cyber Episode 2
The opening is SO CYBER!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!one!!!!!eleven~!!@@!!!!@~~`1!@!!!!!!
So, her box got hacked and the worst that happened was a patient of hers got murdered? Dude, I know a guy who went to LA that got murdered... I don't see the causality, there. So, anyhoo, that was such a cyber opening. She is obviously using parts of the Internet we can only dream about... aaaaand scene open on an amusement park.
OH NO does somebody haxxor the controls on a ride, for to MURDER someone?
We see a guy with a scale model of a park, and now he's controlling it with his smartphone? Well, called it before I saw it... murder... from CYBER stuff. Why the guy had to build a scale model to do his thing, I don't know. You can get pretty much the same effect from a CAD drawing, and it doesn't leave any physical evidence. While he's at it, I'm pretty sure he could have used a PC to send the code. Most PCs can run a console session to whatever's running the ride and issue commands, assuming he's got root.
Now we switch to LilBowWow, who is somehow a hacker, whose boss wakes him up by setting off his car alarm. WORST. BOSS. EVER. Not cool, not cool at all. Worse, boss lady has somehow gotten her smartphone to run BowWow's car alarm. Isn't that theft or something? Harassment? And all he complains of is that she's messed with her car? If he's got a dim and shady past, he'd be all up ons about his rights being violated and all that. Who writes this script?
Back to the office... loads of natural light, but nobody's sweating bullets. Odd, since I hear no AC sounds, in or out of the comm rooms. Also, seems like they still don't have sufficient light where the computer screens are... MY WORD THAT IS A LOT OF COMPUTER SCREENS. And all the monitors on all the desks (looks like they got some desks since last week) don't seem to be connected to any computers, and they don't look like they have computers built into them... in other words, they're either dumb terminals or props. The only wires seem to be phone cables, power lines for the monitors, and... wow, that is so not a place of hackers. Not nearly enough cables there.
Well, the guy with a tie says it didn't break in any other way, so it's gotta be TEH CYBER that caused the murder. I guess we gotta solve it with cyber stuff. So we get to see that CAD file with flashy lights on the diagram.
WAIT A MINUTE: ALL THE COMPUTER FAILSAFES COULDN'T FAIL ON THEIR OWN? Hahahaha, let me show you the last 30 years of computing history, I think we can find cases where complete systems failed when a cable got cut. Happened just a few months ago in my company when a guy with a backhoe severed a fiber link. Guys with backhoes... those are the REAL hackers you want to apprehend, my friend! There are also things called "program crashes", perhaps you've heard of them? For the lady to say that's not possible just shows to me that there ain't no experts involved in this script writing process. But do let us continue, assuming for the moment that, indeed, this is not possible without OMG HAX being involved.
And now we watch a phone video for evidence? Not cyber, my friends. It's just film footage. Yes, it is more prevalent, but no, it's not cyber enough for my tastes. Anyway, the ONE victim was getting a proposal. What do you want to bet the guy proposing is connected to the murder? That, or he's the rival of the murderer. Either way, he's a person of interest. As the cyber globe spins and we zoom in on the cyber map centered on the cyber crime, I'm deep down hoping that someone checks the audit logs on the software, gets the IP address of the system that logged on to make the change, trace it back to some ISP in Richmond, and then bust in on a kid studying the Tracer-Tee video to learn how to be a hacker. Tougher would be if the change was done from an IP within the amusement park, as then one would have to see who logged in to the device that launched the SSH to the control system. I mean, they *do* have their devices locked down with RADIUS or TACACS+, right? Right? Because that creates an audit trail, you know... anyway, that's the real world version of how this gets solved. I wonder how much more CYBER! the solution tonight will be...
Interrogating witnesses in surround cam makes me dizzy as hell. Stand still and cut it out. That's not cyber, anyway. It's hack camera work. And that was to take the place of footage of the boss lady reading reports? How about save a few seconds and have her walk up to someone else and say, "I read the reports. Nasty stuff, amirite or amirite?" Also, those geeks on the show should be making WAY more Monty Python references. Just sayin. Well, more people died, that's sad for them. But why aren't they getting forensics off the computers? One good thing: pointing out that physical proximity is not necessary for TEH 1337 h4x. Thank you for pointing that out, but I hope that it doesn't backfire and cause bosses around the world to slash their physical security budgets. Because, FYI, physical proximity can make hacking a whole helluva lot easier, especially if you can boot a device to ROMMON...
OK, there's a kid that wants to get something from the scene... he's obviously more important than looking at the audit log for the control system. Ah! It's the loverboy! Wait a minute, why aren't they asking him questions? Maybe he knows something or someone! NO DON'T CUT TO THE OPENING MONTAGE! Oh well, too late now...
Back to the show... why is bearded hacker not already got his RJ45 plugged in? Bad form. And why is he doing PC work in the middle of a bunch of dead bodies? And he's investigating a crash... WHICH MAKES WHAT BOSS LADY SAID EARILER A COMPLETE LIE! How does he respect himself, working for those numpties? OK, so bearded hacker shows that the system is receiving a stream of false information, that there's no reason to engage brakes or whatever.
Wait a minute... there's a DECISION to engage brakes? How about there's a step in the program to engage brakes? That way, there's no chance to have logic circuits fail... you know, with false sensor data...
LilBowWow tells us he heard dame rumor say it was a matter of time before someone hacked the amusement park, but bearded hacker says that it was IMPOSSIBLE because the system wasn't connected to the Internet or to any system that was connected to the Internet. So I guess it must have been Old Man Mungus dressed up as a troll to scare people off so he could buy the park for cheap to get the oil under it and he would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those two kids, two adults, a person with a canine-sounding name that all travel in a van together... ZOMGWTFBBQ THIS IS A SCOOBY DOO EPISODE RIPOFF!
Well, about TIME they check the audit logs... No missing cards? Use a card scanner. Check, they figured that out, too. Man but I can't get enough of the cyber screen dissolves. Well, now we know a former employee, let's send the jackbooted feds around his house... WAIT IT WAS THE GUY I TOLD YOU TO CORRAL BEFORE THE OPENING CREDITS! YOU SIMPS! YOU DOPES! YOU PATHETIC EXCUSES FOR COPS! YOU LET THE PERP ***WALK***??? That's it, you idiots... no more classic rock for your opening montages for a week!
Let's interrogate the guy in the same poorly-lit interrogation room that all the CSI departments favor. Seriously, all the money they spend on monitors, it's a wonder that they have budget left for any light at all.
Hey, wait, boss lady just said this guy was innocent? OK, he was innocent... or a total sociopath. No hunches, please? Let's use evidence, mmmkay?
Evidence like the radio stuck in the control system. That's interesting. So how did the radio get stuck in there in the first place without setting off a monitoring alarm that goes off when the system power goes down when there's a hardware change? Or did the guy take a very real risk of shorting out the entire box by shoving in a card while it was powered up? And now the bearded hacker opens up his sandwich in a cleanish room environment and then merrily jacks with the nearby elevator, courtesy of his hopped up smartphone.
This is how you get fired, kids. Don't ever try this at work. If you jack with an elevator with a hopped up smartphone, you will be fired and you will likely face criminal prosecution. It's bad enough if you do that to a production system. When you risk the integrity of the building physical plant, you endanger lives. How do you know that the control you just snuck in won't lead to a short that causes a critical failure in the elevator shaft, leading to a severe injury for someone when it takes a 2-foot fall before the autosave features kick in? Totally not cool, bearded hacker, and you're fired. Good help may be hard to find, but we can still keep looking until we find it.
Because boss lady has no natural boss-like reactions in the presence of bearded hacker, though, he keeps his job, even though he gives a line about how any 9-year-old with a Raspberry Pi computer can wreak havoc on the world. If that was the case, beardy, there would be a lot more mayhem in the world. A LOT. I don't know how much longer I can watch this... anyway, now we have a remote haxxor again. And, somehow, the perp had to have been someone that WANTED to see the mayhem because of the short range of the radio... why not a guy that planted another device within 60' of the radio that itself was able to receive commands from over the Internet? Seems more likely... and pretty easy to hide... and why isn't this perpetrator putting as much distance between himself and the crime scene? Like on a plane to Mexico?
DNA evidence from a PC card? Really? OK, then... and the hacker girl is apparently another enslaved former bad guy, like Lil BowWow. I don't like this justification of soft totalitarianism. But we learn now that the perp is an informant... so does the guy running the investigation hand him over and blow his own investigation for three murders? He does if he's forced to! So the cops but some poor stereotypical hacker in a really badly lit room with at least enough wires to justify his being a geek.
And now Lil BowWow gets his first assignment worthy of his FNG (Friggin' New Guy) status: He has to be the one to troll the gorepr0n forums to find evidence. BAHAHAHAHAHAHA better you than me, sucker! He tries to make excuses, but boss lady tells him otherwise: get off your can and start burning out your eyes with things you will never unsee, boy, or I will put you back in the chokey!
But wait, he's *smiling* as he does this? Eeeeeewwwww! And as he tries to log on, he gets "username taken" errors with skulls and crossbones? Are there so many people on the site that all the good usernames are taken? Like LilBowWow and LilBowWow1 and LilBowWow2015 and Lil_Bow_Wow? Wow, maybe this site isn't as exclusive and xenophobic as you made it out to be, FNG hacker... I mean, after all, they don't even have a paywall or a "the site admins will review your account application" message.
But he gets his account, and all is well, right? All is really well because apparently the site admins decided to install the "match a picture via polygon analysis" mod. Are you serious? Why not just do that on Google images? And why is it that the guy that posted it is going to be the killer or at least directly connected to the killer? Wouldn't something like this "go viral?" Because I know that going viral is TOTALLY CYBER!!!!!@@!!!~!~!``1211!!! I mean, wouldn't this kind of stuff be all over 4chan in a matter of seconds?
Well, the next scene shows the curly haired boss casting doubt on FNG's ability to get on a "deep web" forum in only a few hours. Given that the "deep web" is basically made up of unindexed pages, either FNG gets down with some really kinky stuff in his off-hours and just happened to be able to make this kink pay out for work, or the deep web forum was actually linked somewhere that gets indexed and, therefore, is not really part of the deep web. Sure, the site itself can have spiders turned off and all, but if someone can find it in a Google search for "gorepr0n", it ain't all that deep. Pages that can only be seen by logged-in members, by the way, aren't really deep web content. They're private site content.
But then, the fact that FNG can do a search on the content there probably means that curly has no clue how shallow that site is. If it's searchable, it ain't deep content, end of story. The fact that we now find out there is a public and a private part of this horrific forum puts the final nail in the coffin of the deep web business. Deep web stuff is *all* private. And if the video got posted *to* the site, I gotta call major major BS. I am not about to host video on my site, at all. I don't have the web space and, frankly, I don't want guys like the perp in this tale to post crap like what he did in this case. Who's hosting this video that also allows hot linking? And why is anyone caring about this video, when ISIS is putting out so much quality snuff video?
Well, the perp didn't get in with the roller coaster, so he posts that he's gonna crash a subway. Well, that means DC is in trouble, as it has a subway. So now, clean cut hacker says we need to find the MAC address of the bluetooth device that the perp used and then BLOXXOR IT! Well, that's easy. Just put a lot of USB 3.0 hubs near critical devices in the subway, so as to interfere with the bluetooth transmissions. We just saved the world!
No, wait, they're going to use a scanner while all the FBI agents crowd around the chat window and get their jollies... ewww! But, they find out it's in Boston, and in 3 hours. Which train? NOT SO FAST GUMSHOES! The FOR REALS gorepr0n admins sussed you out and gave you a blue screen of death... and you're using WINDOWS 95?
WINDOWS 95, are you kidding me? You got the fatal error 0E at 0028:C00228448 error message? I used to support Win95 and saw that all the time! Here's the KB on that error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189655 . You got the wrong version of Norton Antivirus running, my friend. The wrong version of Norton. I take it back, you didn't get that from the site admins. You did that to yourself because you blew all your budget on monitors and forgot to upgrade your Windows to a version that's not end-of-life.
Lady boss then makes her totally accurate predictions about our scumbag perp and I'm going to bet that our heroes will be in Boston in three hours to stop the subway from crashing. The bad guy is already there, so time is of the essence!
How they get to Boston inside of 3 hours is beyond me. That's not cyber, that's just fake.
And why do they have to *be* there? Isn't there an FBI office in Boston? Haven't these guys heard of telephones? You know, the *other* network that connects everyone together? Why isn't this CSI: Telephone, as the agents track down the darker side of Alexander Graham Bell's invention, back in the 1890s? Plot holes abound, like zeroes in their budget for slick monitors... well, I'll write that show later because the yellow line train is on the hot rails to hell, it seems. It won't stop and, apparently, nobody can cut power to that 3rd rail or anything sensible like that. Calling the operator would be good, since he can do stuff to regulate the train speed, such as applying brakes and what-not.
And how is tearing through the streets in black SUVs going to save the day? And how is typing like mad on a PC somehow connected to a 3G network going to save the day? How in the hell did they hack into the Boston subway system in order to save it? Is it *that* wide open? We're talking default usernames and passwords open... with zero latency, no less. On a 3G connection. That somehow remains connected in spite of tower handoff that HAS to be involving layer 3 roaming after a few blocks...
And those streets the SUVs are careening down? They are SO not in Boston. I counted a grand total of zero potholes and I think I saw a few dwarf palms. California, much? Maybe the palms were plastic, but no potholes? Nobody double-parked? Getouddaheah. That ain't no Boston.
Nice product placement: the crappy Jeep Cherokee gets in the way of the FORD! SUV!. Welcome to tonight's episode of CSI: Payin' Them Bills!
"I stopped the train!" Wait, what? Bearded hacker did it just like that? Cool. "You've got to get those people off that train!" So cleancut hacker and FNG have to run down there? Aren't there any transit cops that can assist? The system's in a state of shutdown, so they ought to have been alerted... and there are still people in the station that have to be almost run over by cleancut and FNG? SHOULD NOT THEY HAVE BEEN EVACUATED? What kind of sick world is this where people can just toy with elevators and shutting down a subway does not involve an evacuation? Welcome to tonight's episode of CSI: Plot Holes!
OH NOES THE TRAIN STARTS TO MOVE AGAIN! Seems like bearded hacker couldn't work wonders, after all. Well, now it's up to cleancut to save the day. He tries to pull the stop cord. JUST BRILLIANT, DUDE. He then has to Tom Cruise it and lean outside the train to pull off the evil computer with a coat hanger and the cord he mentioned at the start. AND HE PUNCHES THE COMPUTER TO WIN! YES! I have always wanted to punch a computer in order to win.
Boss lady uses her superduperpsychology powers to suss out the bad guy and it's all over. Except it's not so very cyber to solve a crime with wild guesses. Just sayin.
LilBowWow FNG now complains about doing paperwork and bearded hacker says it's a necessary evil... and that the murderer "might do a lot of time." I'm not buying that. This is death penalty stuff. Perky lady hacker with almost no lines makes an offer to get pizza and beardy complains about a phone on vibrate. SO not realistic. The phone you complain about is the one with the damned ring tone running full blast all the time. You want to take a hammer to that and PUNCH THE COMPUTER TO WIN! See, that would have been a great ending. Instead, we have to endure witless banter. FNG walks away and leaves his cell phone on the table after beardy complained about it. We close with a shot of beardy answering the phone... what we don't see is beardy signing him up for spam and sending rude texts to everyone he works with.
:kiwf: