Mr. Robot has won the hearts and captured the minds of a lot of people around the globe by showing a captivating view of the information security world \u2014 and how vulnerable we all are to cyberattacks. When you see how main character Elliot and the hacker group fsociety hack whole corporations, never mind just regular accounts, it starts to seem like nowhere and nothing is safe.<\/p>\n
But if you look more closely, you\u2019ll notice most of the hackers\u2019 victims in the series exposed themselves to danger by their own ignorance or carelessness. In this post, we look at where they went wrong and come up with some rules to follow if you never want to contemplate a video featuring a Guy Fawkes mask obscuring the face of a person who has your data.<\/p>\n
Why are we using Mr. Robot as an example? Mainly because most security experts think the hacking methods shown in this series are very true to life.<\/p>\n
Elliot hacks the accounts and gets access to the information of both acquaintances and strangers with very little effort \u2014 by using brute force<\/a>, whereby a program tries all possible combinations of characters until it finds a match, or using a simpler version of it called a dictionary attack<\/a>. The more popular and simpler the combination of characters and words, the faster the program will discover it.<\/p>\n WARNING! SEASON 1 SPOILERS AHEAD!<\/strong><\/p>\n The pilot episode finds Elliot hacking the account of his therapist, Krista, whose password \u2014 Dylan_2791 \u2014 is her favorite singer and her year of birth with the digits reversed. Elliot has to know just a little bit about a person or use public information from their social media.<\/p>\n He hacks the accounts of his colleague Ollie Parker, whose password is \u201c123456Seven\u201d (Ollie works in a cybersecurity company, so his choice of password is rather revealing). After hacking one account, Elliot easily gains access to all the others \u2014 you know that everything on the Internet is interconnected, right? To make sure this doesn\u2019t happen to you, use passwords properly<\/a>.<\/p>\n You wouldn\u2019t lend your phone to a stranger in a hoodie, but more generally, never give anyone else access to your digital devices. In that same episode, Elliot asks Krista\u2019s boyfriend if he can use his phone to make a call. He then calls himself, thus getting the phone number \u2014 and ultimately, access to a boatload of information about the guy.<\/p>\n In episode three, Tyrell Wellick, chief technology officer for E Corp, gets root access to an employee\u2019s Android phone (control of the system, actually) by adding himself as a privileged user by means of an app with a hidden icon when the employee leaves the room for just a few minutes. The takeaway here: Don\u2019t leave your phone or computer unattended, check which programs are installed on those devices, and regularly scan the system using a security solution that detects hidden software. And, of course, make sure to set passwords to unlock all your devices.<\/p>\nDon\u2019t trust other people with your devices<\/h3>\n
Keep private information to yourself<\/h3>\n