Cybersecurity in Pop Culture
A Series on Security Failures in Popular Movies & Shows
Hollywood has quite the reputation of embellishment and exaggeration when it comes to storytelling. That’s part of what makes it so entertaining. It’s incredibly rare for writers to get things right when it comes to technology, hacking, and cybersecurity. Either way, after studying cybersecurity for several years now, it’s impossible for me to watch a movie without intuitively pointing out cybersecurity concepts and failures. I’m probably ruining the movie for everyone watching it with me, but maybe you’ll appreciate the conversation.
Whether serving as a plot device or due to pure ignorance of the writing team, movies and shows have some excellent examples of security failures and successes. From OpSec failures to human weaknesses, many stories would remain unwritten if the characters simply had a good security posture. In other words, good cybersecurity would ruin a ton of movie plots.
This page will serve as a periodic series where I talk about different cybersecurity issues in pop culture.
Spoilers Ahead
You’ve been warned.
Alien Earth
Thursday, August 8 2026
I’m a big sci-fi fanatic. Some might even go as far as to call me a nerd. The scifi-horror franchise known as Alien lands right up there with some of my favorite films and its latest iteration, Alien Earth, is one of the best yet from the franchise, despite Ridley Scott’s limited involvement. They did something special here.
It’s a brilliant commentary on the technological differences and driving forces behind aliens, humans, cyborgs,synths, and hybrids. What really drew my attention to this series is the juxtaposition they created by showing children’s conscioussness implanted into completely synthetic and insanely powerful humanoid android bodies. What could go wrong? This series, along with many of the Alien movies, rely heavily on poor decisions made by humans due to their emotional state and clouded logic at any given point.
Corporate Espionage & IP Theft
One of the major plot points in the series is the lack of government on this futuristic dystopian version of Earth. Rather than governments, there are 5 megacorporations that run the show. They own everything and they’re lovingly referred to as “The Five”: Weyland-Yutani, Threshold, Dynamic, Prodigy, and Lynch. The two main corporations that this story centers on are Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani. The existence of The Five acts to build a world rife with corporate espionage and IP Theft.
Shortly after the USCSS Maginot crashes in Season 1, Prodigy, led by “Boy Kavalier”, rapidly close in on the ship under the guise of a rescue mission in order to steal Intellectual Property from Weyland-Yutani. This includes stealing the aliens themselves as well as stripping all the data logs from the ship. This is a classic example of data exfiltration and a failure to protect assets. The most valuable asset on board the Maginot wasn’t the ship itself, but rather the proprietary research and and biological specimens it carried. This lines up well with IRL organizations where the cost of physical servers can be insignificant compared to the value of intellectual property, trade secrets, and personal data stored on them.
Had Weyland set up encryption for their logs, then Prodigy would have only found gibberish. Additionally, the ability to remotely wipe logs or lock out users would have stopped the exfiltration before it even started.
Insider Threats
They say that humans, whethere by malice or incompetence, are the biggest hole in an organization’s security posture. An insider threat is when a person working inside an organization uses their access as an avenue of attack. An insider threat doesn’t necessarily mean a malicious insider or a disgruntled employee that intentionally betrays their company. It could also be a legitimate user who is coerced, compromised, or careless with the privileges they’re granted.
Insider threats are one of the more prominent security failures in the show. There are actually a couple different examples of it. In fact, insider threats are THE major reason (aside from greed and stupidity) that the characters in this show run into so many problems.
The first insider threat in the story (chronologically, at least) is what leads to the crash of the Maginot at the beginning of the series. It’s the catalyst for all the action to come. S01E05 shows the events that lead up to the catastrophic spark in the story. A research vessel is on it’s way back to Earth carrying alien biological specimen when a worker on the ship sabotages everything. Aliens are loose, the ship is damaged, and it’s heading on a collision course for Earth all because an insider compromised his own infrastructure. The principle of least privilege and appropriate access controls could have saved the day here. There is no reason that he should have had access to the biological samples or the critical safety arrays that he was able to sabotage.
The second insider threat involves one of the “lost boys” from Prodigy. Kavalier happens to be obsessed with the story of Peter Pan -> A boy living in Neverland who never ages. The story is one of his driving forces in his search for immortality, so he names each of the human/synth hybrids he creates after characters from Peter Pan. Ergo, Wendy and the lost boys. These hybrids are the result of copying the minds of terminal children over to synthetic bodies. They can be thought of as super-humans with a child’s mind. One of the lost boys, whose name is Slightly, lures a human victim into the lab to get attacked by a face-hugger. This insider threat murders and creates chaos by incubating a xenomorph and releasing it on the island. (I told you there was spoilers, didn’t I?)
Social Engineering
Both of the insider threats described in the previous section weren’t really acting unilaterally. They were both manipulated by threat actors through social engineering.
Slightly, one of the lost boys, was manipulated into his actions. He’s just a child, after all. Morrow, a cyborg and Security Officer from the Weyland-Yutani corporation, encounters Slightly and Smee at the ship’s crash site. He implants a tracking device in Slightly which he later uses to remotely communicate with him in a sort of telepathic way. Morrow then uses this line of communication to manipulate Slightly into doing his bidding. He almost convinces Slightly that it is his moral obligation to lure a human into his trap, but Slightly always has his reservations and pushed back. It’s not until Morrow threatens Slightly’s family that he finally complies. Remember, he used to be human.
The other insider threat that led to the crash of the USCSS Maginot was orchestrated entirely by none other than Prodigy’s figurehead, Boy Kavelier. He contacts a crew member of the ship, Petrovich and convinces him the sabotage the entire mission through promises of riches and a new body via his new hybrid program. Petrovich asked Kavalier about what would happen if he died, and Kavalier dismissively told him not to do that. It seems as if Kavalier knew that chances of Petrovich’s death were high. Petrovich and his subsequent death were just a tool in the eyes of Boy Kavalier.