FireSail
FireSail I assume this is a Hollywood coined word from the latest Die Hard 4 movie starring Bruce Willis. I had not heard of this term before the movie, although the dramatised hacking techniques utilised to bring down a country have been known for a while. All said in done, this movie rocked!
FireSail in the movie involves three processes:
- Control the traffic and communications (see Electromagnetic Dominance)
- Knock out or more likely disrupt finance sector
- Electrical control
I wonder how many people turn to “hacking” after watching big holywood block busters? Most likely drop the idea once they realise there is no flying through cities Virtual reality style :).
Core, I think Hollywood movies have inspired alot of people to do a great many things. The US flight aviator program applicants trippled after Top Gun. So I agree with you totally :)
First of all, i simply loved the fact that Matt Farrell’s PC showed a Windowslike screen before it blew itself up. Although what sort of worm or virus can physically blow up a PC I’d like to know. Any hacker worth his salt knows that one hacks seriously from a UNIX machine, and the last thing as a screenshot or screen saver he or she is going to have is something that looks like Windows.
As usuall, the film cases a lot of sensation. A lot of Windows users whose favorite saying is “…I didn’t do anything wrong. The silly Computer ate up my report after I spent 3 hours on it!” - the ones who do not believe in gently powering down the PC but simply switching it off at the mains - THESE are going to do more harm than good by actually believing that such a scenerio can happen, and will go around spreading fear among their lot - which undoubtly, are still a large number.
I do NOT bielive such a thing could happen. Passwords aren’t that easy to break, not with the technology involved these days, the FBI does a good job of scaring the living daylights out of anyone who tries breaking into any Govt. system, and really , when I look at the schoolkids nowadays, I personaly do not believe that they have the brains to do any kind of serious hacking.
No. The real, gifted souls who really have the capacity to hack, are very busy with open source and figuring this technology into PC security systems and making money from them, or just developing with open source and seeing what you can get away with, and eventually bringing down the power of Microsoft and their worthless products.
BUT
if NORAD, and any other govt. agency believe that anything they bought from Microsoft is going to “protect” or run a mission critical system without major or dire consequenbces - then they are wrong. They’d really do better to listen to their Project Managers and a few geeks to try and get an overall view of things.
GulaMelacca, if only this were the case :)
oh yeah,
the movie rocked,well some what realistic…
“BUT
if NORAD, and any other govt. agency believe that anything they bought from Microsoft is going to “protect†or run a mission critical system without major or dire consequenbces - then they are wrong. They’d really do better to listen to their Project Managers and a few geeks to try and get an overall view of things.
”
LOOOOL
I think it should be “fire sale” instead of fire sail. :)
Secondly, the computers blew up because there were explosives inside/under it. I think they tried to portray that pressing the Delete key completed some circuit which detonated the device once they triggered something else which fuzzed out the display and/or froze the system up enough to cause someone to press Delete. Sadly, if they could send that signal from a van outside, why bother with that and just signal the detonator? And why Delete? Lame…but still entertaining. :)
@Gula: There are plenty of very talented people running Windows, either primarily or as one of their systems. Maybe real hackers don’t use Windows, but I think many a mature hacker decides the ease of Windows beats wasting time tweaking *nix to get everything working. At any rate, you’re right that people get scared into not being criminals. It happens everywhere. I mean, how easy is it for you to go assault, rob, or kill someone right now? Pretty damned easy…but you don’t do it. :) A difference with kids these days is they are not being brought up with little fulfilling entertainment and having to figure their own way with extremely limited early systems from the 70s and 80s and even early 90s. They get all this stuff automatically handed to them, so they skip right up to Ajax coding and Ruby and leave behind all the formative, basic stuff. Just a different childhood, just like any generation, really.
:(
GulaMelacca…hope you dont think that they blew up the computer from hacking….and that there was actually c4 attached to the back of the computer which was activated with the help of hardware and software…but as you say…highly improbable that a hacker of that caliber wouldnt notice somethings added” to the computer.
also…correct me if im wrong…it is possible to break a computer and create a fire if youre lucky, by overheating the processor…,but once again…not explode it..
yeah the movie rocked. i definately went home and googled “how to become a bad ass hacking genius.” but the only thing that came up was porn for some reason and all these programs i had to pay for which sucks. i’m not going to pay to become a hacker.
yes i am an impressionable youth.
and yes i would have sex with bruce willis.
Loner Vamp,
“They get all this stuff automatically handed to them, so they skip right up to Ajax coding and Ruby and leave behind all the formative, basic stuff.”
I don’t really believe that kids into programming these days get started with Ruby and AJAX. It’s too complicated to understand without first getting to grips with the fundamental basics of loops, conditions, variables and arrays. Having said that, I have right infront of me, one of our “expert” University Degree qualified hot top programmers (aged26) teaching a student of 16 who is here for 2 weeks as an apprentice. He simply wants a taste pf what programming and Systems administration is all about. In the first week, when the top hat programmer of ours was ill, i downloaded GWBASIC and a tutorial for the little chap and he was really excited. He didn’t even know what a compiler was, so i brought him along s l o w l y. Today, he’s at the mercy of the hotshot. Hotshot has him startted on PHP5, MySQL and using Eclipse! Now, you gotta understand, Hotshot talks to no one, and when he does he mumbles and swallows his words, but he’s such a nice guy and he gets everything right, that we just nod whenever he says anything. Anyone else have the same experience?
As for Firesail, you’re right. They should have called it Firesale!
And…as for the search criterion from “…youth”, shorten your search and stop having sex with BWillis and maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for.
The Fire Sail 3 step process:
1. Disable transportation
2. Disrupt business sector and shutdown telecommunications
3. Disable utilities (e.g. Electric, water, gas, nuclear..)
“Everything must go.”
I still believe in free information. ^_^
gullamelacca
well to be honest the film was absolutley fantastic but remember it was just fiction (a rele gd fiction) which means that the stuff in the film isnt real well most of i isnt you shouldnt be worrying about hings like people wanting to be a hacker after watching the film because its hard to become a hacker and not a lot of youngsters our days are bright enough or bothered enough to do something like that and why is it such a crime forit to be a windows computer does it really make a difference hat make the computer was because it exploded because there was a explosive device under it which was triggered when they presseddelete so it didnt blow up because it was windows on its own ! But like i sed the film was brilliant but dont anyone get worrying bout it !
The movie did portray C4 on the equipment, and “delete” was the trigger key to detonate it. As for the movie, there were far less realistic points, but overall it was entertaining. And yes, today’s youth do grow up with different tools. As for the one kid, not knowing what a compiler is…i have 3 cousins less than 10 who can write basic programs better than some of my fellow college students. It really depends on exposure, and aptitude, if you got those, you can get damn good at programming, or otherwise circumventing, and cracking programs(hacking).
edward states: “also…correct me if im wrong…it is possible to break a computer and create a fire if youre lucky, by overheating the processor…,but once again…not explode it..” ..
You could explode it without the c4. It states on Battery packs that the battery would explode with direct heat. I small fire could do that, which would throw the laptop into the air, then having a small compressed gas tube attached near the battery pack could emit a large fire and explosion.
This is hollywood guys, Anything is possible :P
to answer why the Delete button would be used as the detonator instead of just remotely. There is still a chance that the kid might not be at his computer or in the same room when the explosives go off, so if he presses the Delete button himself, he’s already close enough to be killed by the explosion.
I think they were pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del but the Delete key was the only key that’s being focused on the camera. But the film rocks! :)
i totally agree it is a film afterall and therefore it is just fiction so they could do anything in it for all they care they could make the computer fly its a film for god sake and its entertaining
A couple of things that should be noted:
1) Ctrl + Alt + Del is strictly and primarily a microsquish command and is registered with the US patent office. If u noted that they didnt even use a fedora shell (which is ABSOLUTLY FREE) then you guessed it….they probably were using that combo but couldnt since it would state that they were using a MS core OS.
2) The blackhats in the movie seemed to be farking uber 1337 since they could hack the nyc police database AND Mclains 401k credit company in a matter of seconds even though they hadnt even thought of doing so before Mclain got on the police CB. The whitehats on the other hand would have traced the IP even if it was on a continus relay as soon as they hacked the second government federally protected gateway. The BHs had to keep an open and solid connection to be pulling all of that outta their hats as they did. And as soon as they DC’d from the government servers, they would’ve had to rehack it as soon as they wanted to change anything they preveously accomplished (since the automated server bots would simply resume or not function at all as soon as they lost feed.)
And why, this whole time the country was going in shambles, did the fbi not simply order all of the govs servers powered down or DC’ed from the internet? If they were already beeing hacked or targeted for that matter, they wouldve done so to protect whatever they could…esp after how long the movey took place.
And lastly, the social security offices do not hold any of our money. It does hold citizen paid in SS money but does not affect the majority of us in any way (the ones of us who dont collect from them of course). The credit bureaus and banks are the ones who hold our money, and the SS dept. has completely nothing to do with them. In fact they dont even have access to our money.
Bottem Line: A fire sale is not completly impossible, but the margin of error would have it end probably about halfwya through the first stage. For all of that to come together seemlessly is simply not possible. Too many things would have to happen perfectly in sequence to even hack the dmv dept’s server. By then the pentagon would sieze control of all comm throughout the eastern seaboard and if not stop it; jamm it. Our current counter technology far exceeds the exploitable kind. Its like killing someone and getting caught because no matter what u did to cover up your trails, it wouldve just made new ones. Iraq all the way to the second war have shone just how much we can completely shut down a country’s comm abilities and certainly could be turned on to our own.
Even the idea of the Blackbox has never been tried, so if a hacker wanted t hurt somebody that bad, at least the blackbox wouldve happened already. Its not in their blood nor i think it ever will be, so count his blackhat goons out as well ;)
Well all they really need to do is overclock the CPU and disable the cooling unit :)
*amatuer in computer linguistics*
i wonder how long it would take for authorities to bring everything back up if a firesail really did happen? everything as in financial records, control of traffic lights, stuff that got affected in the movie (the gas lines near the end seemed a bit far fetched). and, knowing the secrets the US keeps under wraps, i wonder if there really does exist a last-resort sort of system that keeps everything before it all gets lost up some guy’s sleeve? …
i thought it was possible to sent a negitive feedback through the power cables to the motherboard and cause the capasitors to explode…but they would have mininum yield. and the light could represent the power statbility…just a guess. I did liek the fact that they used alienware computers in the movie :P
The movie rocked:)
I think the movie’s basic idea about this fire sale is pretty interesting (for a movie) and could make this a worthy movie but transforming McClane to a Terminator/Superman hybrid was not such a great idea and cost the movie some credits Of course most ppl won’t care as long there are big booms in it with lots of noise and they talk about things they do not understand. (and I liked the prev. DH movies! but this is full of BS)
But don’t kid yourselves, in a case like this the Country would go down in near freefall speed. A hurricane is nothing to this. It would not happen in one city it would affect regions in the US. The financial loss (especially now - look around a little) all the panic, looting, crime would be extreme. To break codes, passwords and get into systems are not impossible at all.
Remember the few hours black-out in NY some years ago… try that for a month or so!
And if you still have doubts look into the video on cnn about the blown generator…
We reached the time when a SERIOUS steps are needed to make sure this could not happen. While we are spending trillions of dollars on a dumb war(or two) we are wide open and happy ends are for Hollywood)
None talked about taking money from the SSA something else was in that building. Whatch the movie.
you know, having a C4 explosive go off in a computer is very simple…
just for educational reasoning:
1. worm uploaded containing hook to interrupt that occurs opon ctrl + alt +del on PC’s or keyboard press/release.
2. computer glitch (seen on screen) happens to stimulate user action
3. user (instead of trying to find out what is going on) presses the stated trigger keys
4. worm uses OS to send a 5v output on a COM (Serial port) or LTP (parallel port) hardwired internally to the detonator on the explosive
5. boom!
not that hard…
P.S. they didnt blow it up remotely because they may have wanted him near the PC…
LOL if only firesail were real ;(
meh it was a good movie
[...] sent a pretty long comment around my original Firesail post, so I decided to post his comment as a seperate article altogether [...]
Ok well first off! I WANT TO HACK lol j/k it would be a cool skill, but it could get u in alot of trouble, the firesail is pretty kool, woud be interesting if it happend but it would get become like can this edn soon if it did happen lol, well i guess its a movie its suppose to entertained me but geez that movie entertained me alot lol
the real truth to this movie and the whole idea of it is to; just like he said to scare the people into submission to make the government and higher ups more “powerful” and allow them to gain more of the illusion of “money”. This movie also gives common people the idea that no matter how smart you think you can be the government is one step ahead. This movie is a small but real step to stopping a revolution by any person or persons. The truth be told, no one can even imagine the real world what really goes on.
The movie is trying to show that this day in age a large majority of our existance is ran by computers.I enjoyed the movie and I think those who are “techies” like myself enjoy it even more than some. Its just the idea that you could put the world into “armageddon” is what entices us all. The feeling of all that power.
this movie was great, watched it today and weird thing is as soon as he mentioned a single key destroying the entire world (the apple guy) my power went out?… I was like… wtf?.. hah
But it was just a transformer blow. no biggie.
Ok look it is impossible to make an explosion like that from implementing a virus into the computers system. I know of a virus that can melt the inside of your computer by a power overload heating up your system to the point where it starts to melt and like someone mentioned above you’d be lucky to start a fire, it’s true. Next even if the battery exploded since the inside of the computer is not compressed, or compacted removing space, also with air flowing in and out through the filters it throws off box compression. So it might only blow off parts or a part. So if you look at the movie the way the explosion occurred it had to be some type of explosive in the back of the computer because when they pressed the delete button immediately the explosion took place so it couldn’t have been a computer explosion it was probably a c4 connected to the back of the computer controlled by the system ready to go of when the delete button is pressed. But man i loved that movie though it was the best I’ve never seen action scenes like that in any movie before in my life that probably will go in my favorite movie of all time list probably as #1, 2, or 3 ;)oh and a boy that lived not to far from me here in Miami hacked into NASA from the high school and their systems are as good as the pentagons which lead the pentagon to beef up the security systems, plus the government actually hired some of the same hackers that got into their systems and have them working on it everyday to help them fix and loop holes in their systems sounds crazy but true.
Hacking… um… one of you said that we dont have the techno to hack the gov. um… then why has it been done before O.O
oh and also… the way they blew up the computer is by first selling a SuperPower Proccessor… by throwing a bombi n it… you could do any thing lol… its called a 5n2 >.
and last but not least… the guy who said programming was too hard for people… im under the age 16… and i am a expert programmer O.O
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messagebox.show(@”wtf man”);
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well, all i can say is all of you s*cks. quit arguing wats real and not.shut up you bunch of id*ots.bleh
C’mon guys… it’s a wrap! y’all quit arguing, go watch the movie all over again, ‘n have urself some fun, like I’m doin!