Disclaimer: it's mostly opiniated. Who am I to judge? Me.
| Given situation | Movies/series | Reality |
|---|---|---|
| Given situationWearing hoodies and sunglasses | Movies/seriesOf course. Can you even hack without it? | RealityNot so frequent |
| Given situationOpening popups | Movies/series"Popup OD" (OverDose), everywhere on the screen, like being attacked with a nasty eBomb or by old-school viruses. | RealitySplit screens at most. Usually, boring lines in the terminal without the green color. |
| Given situationPlaying sounds and animations | Movies/seriesSuccessful exploits trigger a sound. Hackers have coded animations that can represent what's going on in real-time. | RealityAttackers may customize their machine, but they mostly use command lines. |
| Given situationTyping on keyboard | Movies/seriesThe hacker may type very complicated command lines without looking at the screen at all. | RealityCertainly not like in the movies, but some people can type really fast, though. |
| Given situationRecon and enumeration | Movies/seriesSkipped. Seems totally optional for hackers, even when attacking fortresses. | RealityMandatory. Often takes more time than the operation itself and can require additional recon. |
| Given situationGuessing credentials and predicting behaviors | Movies/seriesAlways right. Hackers seem to have psychic powers. | RealityFailure is highly probable, but it may happen. |
| Given situationExploiting a bug | Movies/seriesIn a blink of an eye and always successfully. The attacker is omniscient. | RealityWould need several attempts and various approaches. Failure is not unlikely. |
| Given situationCracking ultra-secured algorithms | Movies/seriesThe hacker can see things in his mind and solve impossible maths while drinking soda and doing other tasks in parallel. | RealityWould require ridiculously expensive hardware, the best experts in the world, and infinite money. |
| Given situationBrute-forcing passwords | Movies/seriesRuns at the speed of light, even for the strongest passwords. | RealityWould take seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, depending on the passwords length and randomness. |
| Given situationCovering tracks | Movies/seriesThe hackers do not care. Catch them if you can. | RealityMandatory. Otherwise, the whole operation can fail and the attackers might end up in jail. |
| Given situationFinding and exploiting 0-days | Movies/seriesThe hackers are years ahead of the most dangerous APT groups and notorious security researchers. They might even use programs that detect and exploit vulnerabilities automagically. | RealityEven if there's a market for that (e.g. NSO), skilled attackers would have to spend a lot of time like weeks, perhaps months, to find one. The level required here is at least "top elite three-letter agencies / mercernaries / ninjas." |
| Given situationHacking with IA, scripts and programs | Movies/seriesPrograms "act" like Synthients in IO. One may enter "fuck the system" in an input or speak to an IA to get the job done. | RealityUnlike what extravagant declarations might suggest, it still requires constant human supervision an monitoring. |