untraceable movie

I just saw a movie called Untraceable. It is cyberterrorism meets Seven. Although it is very violent, it falls short of the pure “torture porn” genre (i.e. Hostel, Saw). They didn’t sensationalize the FBI computer crime team. They made the characters real people with real problems.

The best part of the movie is that it addresses hard societal questions that we are still struggling with. The killer’s greatest weapon was the Internet itself. He used the anonymity and distributed non-centralized power of the net to broadcast killings on the Internet. Once he captured a victim, he would put them in a contraption that would torture them to death based on how many people came to the site. The FBI is at a loss, because their equipment (while it can easily bait & hunt small time phishers, criminal hackers and adults soliciting sex from kids online) it is useless against this serial killers level of software, Internet, and electronics sophistication. They eventually call upon the NSA, who tell them that they are not allowed to use their resources for domestic issues. With the Patriot Act and NUMEROUS presidential NSA acts, I don’t believe this is entirely true. But the movie seems to suggest that it is.

Although, I disagree with the message of giving more power to the FBI & NSA to catch bad guys (as it would require the loss of more civil liberties of law abiding citizens), I definitely recommend this movie.

Movie fact:

The site used by the killer (www.killwithme.com) actually exists. It’s owned by the movie studio and it’s used to promote the movie. In it, users are taken to a replica of the FBI computer used by the character Jennifer Marsh. Her desktop gets hacked by the killer who provides the visitor with four test he/she must complete to deactivate his site.

Maybe the crime of the century if you ask me. Just like in ‘Hackers’ and ‘Office Space’ a California man has been indicted for a inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab.com in six months — a few pennies at a time, and using the names of cartoon characters.

A salami attack is a series of minor data-security attacks that together results in a larger attack. For example, a fraud activity in a bank where an employee steals a small amount of funds from several accounts, can be considered a salami attack.

The main idea is to make the change as minuscule as possible so that any single transaction will go completely unnoticed[1] (This is due in part to round-off and truncation error[2]).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_attack

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