Must watch hollywood movies based on hacking

Hacking is an art for some, for some it’s fun and for some it’s serious shit. For many people, hacking small Email account is hacking and for some taking down a nation a hacking. For me, it’s knowledge and it’s safeguarding yourself from potential intruders and hackers. Normally, hacking is social engineering and if you are landed here to watch some awesome movies on Hacking, you must be aware of what social engineering is. Anyways, The movie listed below doesn’t teach you how to hack, but these movies are good enough to inspire/motivate you for hacking.

I don’t say, they all are the best one, but certainly they are the top in the hacking movies list and may be you can add some from your movie collection.  You can download most of these movies from torrent site.

Hacking movies every budding hacker should watch:

1. Hackers(1995) : Imdb 

Hackers movie got a complete series and it names as Hackers1, hackers2 and so on. We will start with my fav,”Hackers“. The main attraction of this movie is cyber-war between Acid Burn i.e Angelina Jolie and Zero Cool played by Jonny lee miller. Villain might look funny with his approach and this is something not for serious hacker. Movie got an average rating but this movie is worth watching.

If you want to know how hackers uses their social engineering skills to get sensitive details related to your hardware, this movie will not disappoint you. Here is a trailer of this movie:

2. Antiturst(2001) : Imdb 

A computer programmer’s dream job at a hot Portland-based firm turns nightmarish when he discovers his boss has a secret and ruthless means of dispatching anti-trust problems. Watch Anti-trust trailer:

3.The Net (1995) : Imdb 

The Net

Identity theft is something which is not new to online world of Hacking.  This movie is about Angela, a computer geek who lives a very low profile life. In this movie, her struggle of getting back her online identity is shown. Probably, an eye opener for many who think how is it possible to completely wipe off someone identity and create a new one.

4 Pirates of silicon valley(1999): Imdb  :

This is a documentary movie about the birth of desktop computing. A complete saga of 1970′s to 1997. This documentary narrates the real incident happened in this period between Microsoft (Bill Gates) and Steve jobs (Apple).  Again, not a real movie on hacking but worth watching for everyone. After all, Hacking is all about spirit and knowing the basics and our basic is computer.

5. Takedown(2000) : Imdb  :

Kevin David Mitnick is at present working as an american computer security consultant. This movie is about his life and how a hacker turned down into country computer security counselor. Just to add more into the surprise, when Kevin was arrested for his cyber-crime, he was in the list of most wanted cyber criminal.

6 Wargames(1983) :Imdb 

An academy award winner movie which is about a young hacker who initiated a nuclear warhead by mistake, possibly a start of World war III. Somehow, I didn’t enjoyed watching this movie much but many of my friends liked it and recommended to be added in this list.

7. Swordfish(2001) : Imdb 

Talking about Hacking how we can forget John Travolta’s Swordfish, which shows his intelligence and a master-plan to steal billions of dollar from U.S soil without getting caught. And if you have not seen this movie yet, check out Swordfish trailer below and grab this movie:

8 Live free or die hard(2007): Imdb 

This movie is about complete take down of a country by attack in grids. Here villain Gabriel, planned to take down last piece of data containing all financial transaction record for the country. This was a well planned attack and at one point you will be amazed to see the pattern of attack. Though, it’s more of a Bruce Willis action movie sequel  but worth watching. Check out movie trailer here on Youtube .

9. The Matrix(1999) : Imdb  :

This movie is about “Neo”, a computer hacker who learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against the controllers of it.  You might consider watching Matrix triology, as without watching sequel this movie is incomplete. Here is a smash trailer of Matrix trilogy:

10. Untraceable(2008) :Imdb  :

I saw this movie last week, and like the concept of the movie.The movie feature gorgeous, sexy, babealicious Diane Lane. The movie shows how a website www.killwithme.com which shows the live torturous killing of users become a hit, and the Diane ended up finding the killer.

11. Sneakers(1992) : Imdb 

A group of computer hackers parleys their skills into a career, testing the security of computer systems by deliberately trying to break into them. They get entangled in a complex plot involving the National Security Agency and the Mafia.

12) The Social network (2010) : IMDB 

Needless to mention it’s not a Hacking movie but I’m sure talking about Hacking, you might want to know How Facebook come into existence and why there are so many controversies related to Facebook. Probably, you might change your perception about Mark Zyckerberg. It’s a complete story of how a Harvard student started a simple site to compare girls and how he landed with the idea of Facebook. A complete journey of Facebook which every geek should watch. Here is trailer of The Social network:

Are you missing your favorite hacking movie in this list? Let us know which one you missed and we will love to add them. 

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Top Indian Hackers

Pranav Mistry


The famed 6th sense developer,Pranav Mistry is a research assistant and a PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab.SixthSense has recently attracted global attention. Among some of his previous work, Pranav has inventedMouseless - an invisible computer mouse; intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located and can send reminders and messages; a pen that can draw in 3D; and a public map that can act as Google of physical world. Pranav has commercialized his invention, the sixth sense and SixthSense is now being actively used at NASA. It is rumored that Facebook tried to acquire the technology from Pranav for a reportedly $2 billion and 5% ownership of Facebook, but Pranav decided to open source it instead.



Thats what any real hacker do. Hats Off to him.


Koushik Dutta or “Koush”

“Set Your Phone Free..”

Rings a bell ? Koushik Dutta or “Koush” is responsible for Clockworkmod recovery and Rom Manager for Android rooting and the core member of famed UnrEVOked team. He has been a .net developer from heart and had his internship initially at Microsoft and is a former MVP. He decided to leave Microsoft and hack Android cellphones like there was no tomorrow. Sony approached him after geohot humped them like anything but he politely declined .


Bravo for his efforts, we are able to root painlessly using UnREVOked.
Now only if UnrEVOked can release UnrEVOked 3.33 soon :)

Vivek Ramchandran


Vivek Ramachandran has been working in the computer and network security domain, in some form or the other, for the past 7 years and has worked with Industry giants like Reliance, Cisco, Microsoft. He was among the Top 10 Indian finalists in the Microsoft shootout competition among the list of 65000 participants. Then he decided to join Airtight Networks and there discovered Caffe Latte attack attack along with his colleague MD Sohail Ahmad from Airtight Networks ,the wifi hacking technique that doesn't required you to be in active vicinity of the wifi zone. 

That said, he is one of the researcher to lookout.

Almost everybody at NULL Security Community & Garage4hackers
I said it before and I will say it again, the Only active Indian hacking community is NULL community, and the best Indian Hacking Forum where real hackers meet is garage4hackers.com hands on.


Shoutz to garage crew :)

Folks at Indian Honeynet Chapter
Now we are talking..Indian Honeynet chapter is the collaborative effort of the best geeks and hackers .The focus of honeypot is on Worms and Botnets and developing an Open Source tool to study and counter brute force attacks/ phishing through wifi. Its also being setup as potential web-app honeypot,and aims on improving detection and forensic techniques.  Heading the ship are L Shriram, K K Mookhey, Amit Chugh, Asim Jakhar and a lot of professionals who are dedicated in the field of computer security.


Hari Prasad

The famed security researcher Hari Prasad is the winner of EFF Pioneer award, as he along with Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp were able to study an electronic voting machine (EVM) and found significant vulnerabilities that would not be difficult to execute. For his troubles, Prasad was arrested and jailed in August, held without bail in Mumbai for a week. Though he is now out on bail and in the United States, he still faces criminal prosecution for alleged theft of the EVM and other charges.

The genius of the Indian system is that instead of making machines tamper proof and more efficient, they arrested him.

According to the Indian news agency PTI, the magistrate who released Prasad on bail noted that "no offence was disclosed with Hari Prasad's arrest and even if it was assumed that [the electronic voting machine] was stolen it appears that there was no dishonest intention on his part...he was trying to show how [electronic voting] machines can be tampered with."

Jayant Krishnamurthy



Jayant Krishnamurthy is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, CMU and his interests include are machine learning, machine reading, common sense reasoning, information extraction, knowledge representation, and their applications in AI and NLP (shamelessly taken from his website). He is one of the researchers who are behind designing MD6 algorithm (yeah you heard it right, the evolution of MD5). He is a top level computer theorist and researcher and is a real life hacker. He teaches computer and network security  and you must ahve a look at the problems and solutions at the given link.

For the lighter side,you can have a look at the funny flash movie based on his real life experiences at high school .


I guess, you now have an actual idea of the Indian hackers now :) These guys are real and are deemed worthy of having the hacker emblem with them.

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