So you’re a social person. Online, connected to everything and everyone on-the-go. You’ve got an active Facebook account, an open Instagram account that throws light on the fun and fantastic life you live, a Twitter profile with thousands of followers craving your opinion about the latest change in traffic rules or your review of the recent Bollywood movie. You obviously access your email everyday, which the service provider ensures is safe and strictly For Your Eyes Only. Well, for yours and that hacker, casually coding his way into your very identity.
Paranoid yet?
You should be, especially if you’ve met Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) of the very gritty and very Fight Club-ish Mr Robot. The Golden Globe-winning television thriller follows the unnerving workings of the mind of a seemingly harmless security engineer at a cybersecurity company called All Safe. However, Elliot is anything but. In therapy for his social anxiety and clinical depression, Elliot connects with the world around him by hacking them. This often leads him into act as a cyber-vigilante, protecting those he cares about from the ever-evil world around him. The show is scheduled to be aired soon on Colors Infinity in India.
One day, Elliot is recruited by a community of hackers who call themselves, “fsociety” via a bug that only he can see in a hack they make into the system of E-Corp, a multinational corporation and All Safe’s biggest client. More commonly known as Evil Corp, the conglomerate represents everything that is wrong with the world and is fsociety’s main target – ground zero for a worldwide cyber revolution.
The show is fast-paced, visceral, original and, as reports go, extremely authentic. Its accurate use of Linux and social engineering is being applauded for depicting hacking unlike never before. A member of the hacker collective Anonymous claims that Mr Robot is the “most accurate portrayal of security and hacking culture ever to grace the screen.”
The show highlights what war will look like in the very near future – where data is going to be the biggest vulnerability and threat; where passwords don’t ensure security; where no one will be safe as long as they’re connected to a large pool of cyber information. So, let me just ask you again, paranoid yet?
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