Me and my programmer friends were losing it in the theater we were laughing so hard at the hacking scenes.

"Hacking" involves lots of network traces running in dark terminals. What it does not involve is weird rotating globes of characters (which aren't even HEX! I thought, ok, they're exaggerating, so they have the hex randomly scrolling for no reason, then I notice it has the whole alphabet and embedded plain-text...sigh).

Also Q is one of the dumbest tech experts. What kind of idiot takes a compromised machine and plugs it directly into his top-secret government network (using 2 ethernet cables for some reason). Honeypots and VMs exist for a reason.

And then they keep dropping in actual security terminology that has no relevance to whatever the hell is supposed to be happening on screen. "Security through obscurity" was our personal favorite, and caused us to collectively lose it.

I still like the movie a lot, but you'd think in 2012 our hacking scenes would be a step beyond the "Unix" sequence in Jurassic Park.

You only need to look at Stuxnet, and how it set the Iranian nuclear program back by a year, to realize the cyber-warfare age is well upon us. The amount of coordination and planning that attack took on the part of the US and Israel, is pretty crazy

If we go back to network intrusion, this can be performed remotely and silently from a territory which does not uphold the law as it applies in the target country. Any fallout, if discovered in the first place, would be diplomatic. This is a very different scenario than physically accessing a location on foreign soil. We have lots of experience in building walls and employing guards, not as much defending from something we can't see.

There's a perception that cyber warfare is just about shutting down systems and blowing things up, where as it appears a far bigger concern is information gathering. There is history of this occurring at a corportate level, and I believe this has also been documented from within government departments.

When was the last time we were at war with a technologically advanced country?