Why hacker clichés are a cyber crime

By Tim Martin

For about the first ten minutes, “You Are Wanted”, Amazon’s first German-language original series, conducts itself like a properly unnerving drama about data security and identity theft. Young dad Lukas Franke, played by Matthias Schweighöfer (who also produced the series), is halfway through his shift as manager at a posh Berlin hotel when the city suffers a power cut. As he deals with confused and angry guests, he is collared by a bleeding man who says he has tripped on a loose carpet and injured himself. Lukas offers the man his number, and later gets a message about compensation with a contacts file attached. By clicking it, he unknowingly grants a hacker access to his phone, then to his home network, then to all his data and passwords. He ends up being framed for the blackout, which turns out to have been caused by a cyber attack, and has to prove his innocence.

In a year of information wars, and a week where Wikileaks claimed to have shared the CIA’s ferocious battery of surveillance tools online, the series’ launch could hardly have been better timed. It is plausible, too. Data breaches usually happen through inadvertency, and are normally slightly dull. Britney Spears, Barack Obama and Stephen Fry have all been phished with fake emails from Twitter. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, answered the wrong message about changing his password last spring and found his Gmail archive plastered all over Wikileaks. So-called social engineering often yields better results than any computer wizardry, and bluffing past people’s instinctive barriers of mistrust to make them believe you have a reason to be there (along with your innocuous-looking attachment, your password-reset link or your helpful little USB device) is frequently the most difficult bit of a hack. It’s also the hardest to guard against.