Reimagining 5 Cybersecurity Threats as Horror Movie Posters
Wanna feel scared? Streaming a movie can catch your device a nasty virus, compromise your identity, or deliver your banking details to thieves.
And despite what the Scream franchise taught us, the virtuous are not safe. Think you’re watching a film legally? You got another thing coming. Today’s pirates don’t just peddle movies – they share streaming apps and add-ons that look legit but may be riddled with malware.
Grabbing the nearest lamp/trophy/*insert innocuous-looking household object* won’t help you defend yourself against cybercriminals. But forewarned is forearmed – so Surfshark has identified five chilling cybersecurity and privacy threats and created awareness posters in the form of horror movie adverts to grab everyone's attention.
If these don’t shake you out of your indifference to cybersecurity, then you’re truly on your own. Or are you?
Copycat (Alfred Hitchcock on identity theft)
Identity theft! On a psychoanalytic level, your identity is a soup of experiences, relationships, and desires. But when it comes to your financial security, your identity is a jigsaw puzzle of cut-and-pasteable names and numbers. When fraudsters crack your password or hack your system, it’s only a matter of time before they build a convincing replica ‘you’ and start spending in your name. The copycat-you could even sell your house!
Inspiration: Saul Bass’s iconic Vertigo poster was the inspiration for our cyber-era Hitchcock movie. In the original film, James Stewart falls in love with the doppelgänger of his dead lover, not realizing he is being played by unseen forces. Hitchcock was a master of the switched-identity twist. The ‘master of suspense’ had audiences covering their eyes in an era where blood and gore were minimal. One trick was to destabilize that most fundamental human value: the sanctity of identity.
Bait (Jordan Peele on phishing)
’Phishing’ is a play on ‘fishing’ – criminals drop bait and wait for you to bite. That bait takes the form of a fake text message or email from your bank. Clicking the link may download malware to your device or take you to a spoof website where you feel comfortable ‘confirming your details.’ Either way, your credentials end up in the hands of bad people.
Inspiration: Everything is rosy in the opening moments of a Jordan Peele movie (Get Out, Us). So lovely that a genre audience already feels tense knowing the loveliness must be disrupted by murder and mayhem. But this is just one of the horror movie tropes that the contemporary filmmaker subverts. Because while classic horror launches a killer into the story from the outside, in Peele’s pictures the villain is closer – and more trusted – than you think.
The Eye (Ridley Scott on facial recognition)
Cybersecurity has always been an arms race. Hackers and innocent users deploy ever more sophisticated means to outwit each other. But what happens when the next battlefield is your face? With facial recognition technology, your features become biometric data. And anywhere this ‘data’ is visible (hello, Instagram), you cede precious ground in the battle for privacy and security.
Inspiration: It’s hard to pin Ridley Scott down to a style or set of thematic concerns. But if you had to, you couldn’t go far wrong with ‘dystopian retro-future where technology backfires.’ Blade Runner, in particular, is about who we see and how we see – and how machines might see us.
Pegasus Project (Eduardo Sánchez / Daniel Myrick on spyware)
Can’t they come up with a better codeword for it? Spyware is software that hides on your device, and forwards text messages, passwords, location data, and even feeds from your camera and mic to a remote agent. Or spy. Crooks use this access to steal your identity or deliver precious data to advertisers and other agencies. And the Pegasus software developed by Israeli cyberarms firm NSO Group is alleged to have been used for surveillance on journalists and activists.
Inspiration: Are you old enough to remember when Blair Witch Project (1999) was the most important movie in the world? Sánchez and Myrick’s low-budget ‘found footage’ hit changed what was acceptable in cinema and horror. We reckon the folk-horror feel echoes the Greek myth inspiration behind Pegasus. And the night vision and time stamps of the 1990s camcorder effect remind us that your phone’s camera can tell a story – and you never know who might be watching.
Game Over (Edgar Wright on DDoS)
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is what happens when hackers overwhelm a server or network with internet traffic, causing it to crash. When a rival gamer figures your IP, they can target your system and slow your connection – and your gaming aptitude – to a standstill.
Inspiration: All those fake requests flooding your server reminded us of the zombies and intergalactic androids swarming over the bookends of Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy: Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End. Plus, Wright is known for his kinetic tributes to gaming and movie tropes. Finally, his characters all seem the type to, you know… be lazing around at home playing games when a DDoS attack drops in from nowhere to ruin their life.
Horror is a diverse and inventive genre. You know what else is diverse and inventive? Cybercrime! Don’t become the Non-Believer of your own personal horror movie. Get your passwords updated, your VPN on, and DON’T GO INTO THAT DARK WEB!
Methodology & Sources
We compiled a list of privacy and cyber-security issues from round-ups such as Cybersecurity 101: Intro to the Top 10 Common Types of Cybersecurity Attacks. We explained what each issue does and why it’s considered a threat.
We then compiled a list of horror movie directors from listicles including IMDB and Ranker, noting their most famous movie, directorial style, and visual elements. We then paired each issue to a director and created a movie poster to raise awareness of the issue, inspired by the visual style of the director paired.
Sources
D.Pegg & S.Cutler. (2021). What is Pegasus spyware and how does it hack phones?. theguardian.com
ESET. (2021). Identity Theft. eset.com
G.McKeever. (2021). Game Over: How to Stop DDoS Attacks on Online Gamers. imperva.com
IMDb. (2013). 50 Greatest Horror Directors. imdb.com
Infocyte. (2021). Cybersecurity 101: Intro to the Top 10 Common Types of Cybersecurity Attacks. infocyte.com
K.Hewitt. (2021). 12 Types of Phishing Attacks and How to Identify Them. securityscorecard.com
P. Jauniškis. (2021). How to recognize and avoid phishing attacks. surfshark.com
ProWriters. (2021). The Top 10 Cyber Security Threats Today. prowritersins.com
Ranker. (2021). The Best Horror Directors in Film History. ranker.com
Stealth Labs. (2020).Cyber Security Threats and Attacks: All You Need to Know. stealthlabs.com
Surfshark. (2021). Stick to gaming - a VPN will handle the security. surfshark.com
W.Knight. (2021). Clearview AI Has New Tools to Identify You in Photos. wired.com
Wikipedia. (2021). Botnet. en.wikipedia.org