Blackhat

Synopsis: Nick Hathaway, an extremely talented hacker who has gone astray, finds his way out of a 15 year prison sentence when parts of a computer code he once wrote during his youth appears in a malware that triggered a terrorist attack in a nuclear power plant in China. This opportunity will reunite him with an old friend but will also put him in the middle of a power game between the American and Chinese government as well as an arch villain hacker whose identity he has to find if he wants to keep his freedom and his life.
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
Director(s): Michael Mann
Production: Universal Studios
  5 nominations.
 
IMDB:
5.4
Metacritic:
51
Rotten Tomatoes:
33%
R
Year:
2015
133 min
$5,686,515
Website
2,435 Views


1

An accident has been reported

at Chai Wan Nuclear Power Station.

Hathaway. Cell search. Hands behind you.

Open 16.

Go, go, go!

Search everything.

- Get off that!

- Hey!

Take him down!

One, two, three, up!

Stay strong, carnal.

This was found in your cell.

You added $900 to all your pals'

commissary accounts

in your cell block.

Is this the attack tool?

With it, you open up a terminal

and that gives you a command line?

That how you broke into the network

and plussed-up the balances?

No.

I used it to call Santa

in the North Pole

and told him to do

Christmas early this year.

What do we know about this guy?

His grandfather was a military commander

in Shanghai in the '20s,

in the '30s against the Japanese

through the Civil War.

His father became China's Undersecretary

for Trade to the UN.

He came with to New York.

Bronx High School of Science, MIT.

His sister's a network engineer

in the private sector.

She grow up in New York, too?

No.

He's a rising star in PLA's

Cyber Defense section.

Liaise with them?

It's inviting them

into the henhouse, Carol.

Stanley, we go head-to-head

with the Chinese

on their cyber intrusion

every day of the week.

Not a bad idea to be face-to-face

working with them, for once.

You monitor very closely what they do

and do not have access to.

Okay?

Okay? Send the code.

Okay.

- Let's go somewhere we can talk.

- Hey, hey...

English might be better. Come on.

- Tomorrow? I can't. It's impossible.

- Why not?

I've got an optical-overlay network

that's got to be up in 17 days.

They sent me some code tonight.

The black hat who hit

the Chai Wan reactor.

When I looked at the code, it was...

And?

I have to have a network engineer

with me I can trust.

Really trust.

Like, 100%.

When do we leave?

The meltdown in China

and the run-up in soy yesterday

was facilitated by the same RAT.

How it got loaded in

in the first place, we don't know.

But, once inside, it de-cloaked

and became what it really is.

A remote access tool.

A RAT.

The RAT's job was to open a back door

in our system and call home.

The black hat then used his back door

to inject a second part.

Its payload.

That is what rode up soy.

Now that we're looking at the RA and payload closely,

we're thinking they were...

Written by different authors.

How we figured that out

was through the coding in the RAT.

Though several years old,

it is lean, graceful.

The payload's coding, on the other hand,

feels frenetic, confused...

Frenetic? Or overwritten?

So, the question

we're dealing with is...

Is there somewhere we can talk?

...and if it is two, they may not

be working in close proximity.

Daniels is qualified

in computer forensics.

An intern could have

written that report.

Oh, really?

And who do we need, if not Daniels?

And "liaise" in "liaison group"

implies mutuality.

You don't like our boy, what ideas

are you bringing to the dance?

A man named Hathaway.

He's a convicted hacker,

serving 15 years in U.S.P.

Canaan in Waymart, Pennsylvania.

You telling me some hacker in prison

is hitting our financial markets?

No. But we want Hathaway on the team

so he can help out the investigation.

He hit four major banks,

ran up $46 million in damages.

And that's just what we know about.

You want the DOJ to do anything

other than laugh?

Daniels said two authors

wrote the virus.

I don't know who wrote the second half,

but the first half, the RAT,

the remote access tool

that Daniels called "lean and graceful"?

One of the original authors is me.

I co-wrote it,

as a gag, years ago at MIT.

And my roommate, the genius lead author?

Nicholas Hathaway.

That's right.

The hacker found

the RAT online and modified it.

If we want to move

around within this code

looking for clues to

the hacker's identity,

we need its lead architect.

The reactor in China, I heard about,

but the spike in soy futures...

All right, I didn't know any of this.

We don't get a lot of new news in here.

The US government would like

your technical advice on this.

In exchange for that, we're going

to furlough you right out of here.

You sign that on the last page,

and we'll get you processed.

You'll wear an ankle bracelet

and be accompanied by a US Marshal.

Your computer access will be restricted.

If you wanna study the whole document,

you can go right ahead.

I can come back in a month or two.

No, I'm done.

You didn't sign it.

- Yeah. Why would I sign it?

- Why?

Because of the generosity

of the Assistant US Attorney

in granting you a furlough.

Both you and the Assistant US Attorney

can stick that document up your ass.

I'm sorry?

Why are you sorry?

I insulted you. What are you

sorry for? I'm not sorry.

- Don't think you're gonna...

- Hey.

You wanna raise me up out of here,

solve your trade exchange dilemma,

and I get a furlough for a couple of weeks?

You kidding me?

You have any idea how much progress

you're gonna make

on a strike this complex

without someone like me?

Zero.

This isn't a negotiation.

I just made it one.

You want me? You pass this upstairs.

If my assistance results

in the identification

and the apprehension

of the guy you're after,

I want you to commute my sentence.

If I come up empty,

you toss my ass back in the can.

Those are the terms.

Guard.

Interview's over.

Barrett, how badly do you need this guy?

It's so good to see you, bro.

Not half as much as it

is for me to see you.

Let's get out of here.

So, you planned to reunite with your friend

from the moment you landed?

It entered my mind.

You okay?

Yeah, I'm fine.

Okay. Please keep them out of sight,

if you can help it.

See? He ripped off

and repurposed our code.

- What the hell is this?

- What?

The agreement was an approval

and a presence for his computer access.

- I approved it.

- A DOJ approval.

- Now you're changing the goalposts?

- Hola, chica. You came to me.

How am I supposed to do my work?

On an abacus or something?

"Chica"? Am I Hispanic?

What the hell's going on?

I advocated getting you over here.

I pulled every string to get your convicted

felon sprung, Mr. Chen.

"Captain" Chen. And I didn't ask.

I offered partnership, an equivalent,

or we would do it on our own.

Well, I'll be happy

to bust him back to Canaan

and put your ass

on the first plane back to China.

He apologizes.

My brother misunderstood

our arrangement, Special Agent.

Look around.

I have to run the morning backup.

Your network is sitting behind

deep packet inspection,

intrusion protection.

It's extensively firewalled.

Exactly.

So somebody had to physically

enter this room and plug the virus in.

We reviewed keycard scans

and surveillance tapes.

There was no unauthorized entry.

Now, we're thinking about

a routing weakness.

That's too complicated.

He wouldn't have done that.

Yeah. Well, what you're proposing

didn't happen.

There's only one person who's authorized

to access these terminals.

Me.

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