mr robot

Mr. Robot season 3 is off to a great start. As per usual, the episode features tonnes of Easter eggs for hacker nerds.

But I have to admit I was a little surprised to see a shodan.io cameo. Shodan is a search engine for things connected to the web that isn’t a web server. Web cams, network equipment, industrial controls and other hardware that relies heavily on security through obscurity.

Here’s a fun video from Defcon 20 demonstrating what fun can be had.

Bonus: The search Mr. Robot performs org:”Evil Corp” product:”Apache Tomcat”, returns real results with show relevant data.

Bonus Part 2:

The domain in question has an open SNMP (file sharing port).

No guest account unfortunately. If only I could remember some of the logins from the show.

The rabbit whole goes deep this season! Hack the planet.

I finally watched the pilot episode of Mr Robot and I was totally blown away by the way the handle the hacking aspects of the show. If you haven’t seen the show, the main character is a professional security engineer by day and a “cyber vigilante” at night. It’s great!

Every aspect of the way Elliot – protagonist – goes about his job is completely believable and authentic, from: social engineering techniques, password cracking, right down to the command line.

As an example of the authenticity + poetic license = tech-savviness, throughout the pilot the Elliot uses a command: astsu.

astsu is not a real linux command and it’s not totally clear what it does. However, the way that he uses it feels totally legit. He doesn’t use it when other commands would do the job (like a sloppy writer might have him do) and the arguments he passes to it look about right for something vaguely network/security related. We can assume that this command is code that he’s written himself. The command is basically a plot device for the nerds that will notice this sort of thing.

The fact that writers/producers/whoever demonstrate an incredible attention to detail and authenticity. I’m definitely going to continue watching

Oh, the soundtrack is perfect too.