Did Mr. Robot really get hacking right? A cybersecurity expert reveals the truth about the show’s accuracy 

USA Network's thriller drama series Mr. Robot is hailed as one of the most accurate portrayals of hacking and cybersecurity ever shown on television. Starring Rami Malek as a cybersecurity engineer, the show follows him as he is hired by a vigilante group of hackers called fscociety, which is dedicated to bringing down a corporate conglomerate (E-Corp) and freeing the world from all its debt.

From hacking tools like John the Ripper and Kali Linux to phishing and social engineering, Mr. Robot reiterated that hacking is not just hammering on the keyboard and spewing difficult technical jargon. The makers created authentic codes that looked visually convincing and technically possible.

Almost six years after its conclusion, a cybersecurity expert breaks down one of the most important and technical sequences from Season 2. Her comments further prove that this Malek-led show was way ahead of its time and actually got its hacking right.

More on this in our story.

A cybersecurity expert breaks down a major sequence from Mr. Robot

In a recent interview with Insider, a cybersecurity expert (Elazari) breaks down an important hacking sequence from Mr. Robot Season 2. The scene follows Elliot and Darlene visiting a hacker space with a capture the flag competition. Elliot uses this opportunity to access a backdoor planted in E-Corp and do some good old-fashioned damage via hacking.

Elazri explained how the duo visits a hacking space hosted by CTF, which is a kind of hacker game. The competition aims to 'decrypt a really unique piece of code'. While the CTF sequence is highly realistic, Elliot and Darlene are in the qualifying rounds for Def Con, a real-world hacking conference. This is another example of how Mr. Robot used authentic events and competitions from the world of hacking to make its fictional world seem real.

Breaking down the complete sequence, Elazari explains:

''This sounds quite realistic. It's actually based on the real-world CTF challenge from 2012. So, I think it's really cool the show went to the trouble of getting a real-world hacking challenge. Elliot needs to get in touch with the backdoor that they planted inside E-Corp in the past season. In order to do that, he's utilizing the fact that backdoor, which is basically a computer software, has a hard-coded C2 domain.''

She added:

''But in order to be in a position to communicate with the backdoor, Elliot first needs to take over the domain. And the next thing he does, and we see him do it, is issue the command shred. Shred is a Unix command to not just delete files, but also rewrite them so that the files would be much more difficult to recover even with specialized forensic software.''

While the cybersecurity expert explained the nitty-gritty of this Mr. Robot sequence, she rated the scene 9/10, (one less point just because of how fast everything happened), which is somewhat unrealistic. The backdoor Elliot is trying to find would normally take weeks to do, but Elliot hacks a registrar in just two seconds.

In addition, Elliot also jumps very fast in his CTF game, which is another example of how the show establishes that Elliot is an above-average human. However, the codes he runs during this Mr. Robot sequence still need time and are not possible even via a supercomputer.

Leaving the time issue behind, which is likely a creative decision on the makers' part, Elazri's comments suggest that the Rami Malek-led show truly set a benchmark for all other cybercrime and hacking-based shows.

How did Mr. Robot achieve its near-perfect hacking?

While it is quite rare to see a hacking-based show this accurate, Mr. Robot achieved the impossible by hiring a real technical consultant. Sam Esmail, one of the directors on the show, wanted near-perfect montages of his protagonist while hacking, which is why he hired a real consultant, Michael Bazzell. Bazzell has worked as a cybercrime detective (for fifteen years) and was later brought in as a cybercrime security consultant by Esmail.

In an interview with Forbes, Bazzell described the process of working on the show and Esmail's vision:

''I knew that Sam not only understood hacking but had a very good grasp on it. Instead of showing hackers typing frantically and bypassing every firewall in a system, he focused right away on social engineering, email phishing and the more realistic ways that criminals will get to your information.''

Bazzell's involvement with the project proves that the makers were committed to showing Elliot and his hacking adventures as authentically as possible.

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