“With the Season 2 finale of “Mr. Robot” upon us this Wednesday — and Sunday’s Emmy Award win for Rami Malek as Outstanding Lead Actor — it feels like an appropriate time to reflect on my own involvement with the show as a technical consultant, and, more broadly, the show’s implications for information security.

The technical questions I was asked by the show’s writing staff threw me off balance on several occasions, because what they wanted the characters to do was on a larger scale than the types of attacks I was accustomed to contemplating. Thinking about how to compromise a web server and then pivot to a database server to get at some data, for example, pales in comparison to executing a crypto-ransomware attack like the one against E Corp. And that attack, as it turned out, was only the beginning.” writes Recode

Source: Recode

Why Mr. Robot is so real? Because it shows things that are believed to be impossible by the public. This how bad our control over IT systems has got. No IT professional is proud of this, it may even has been deeply hidden in the back of server rooms and the minds of IT architects.

This series does nothing more than puts problems into plain sight and simply starts telling the truth.

Back 20 years ago in the “Assassins” Sylvester Stallone got his assignments through a laptop and a modem connected to a phone line. The director let the modem’s dial-in voice run for a few seconds but edited the rest of it out, I guess because viewers would not have been that much interested in 30 seconds of machines whistling to each other.

Now Mr. Robot does exactly the opposite. What has happened to us over the period of this 20 years? Why are we more interested in the technicalities in the show? Because we have changed: today’s modern citizen knows more about his digital values and starts to worry about losing them. Now that the cyber world looks more like a battlefield rather than the peaceful adventure it used it be 20 years ago.

I love the Mr. Robot concept. A bit lunatic, a bit crazy but it let’s people know more about what happens to them in cyber space. And no, I don’t care if it hurts, truth does that…