If you’ve never seen the 1992 hacker, caper, comedy movie Sneakers, then I suggest that it’s time for a watch party.

If you have seen it, maybe it’s time to dust off that DVD (as well as that DVD player), and enjoy this oft-overlooked, 34-year-old classic again.

The Sneakers cast suggests that someone had blackmail material on a group of Hollywood actors at the time.

Sneakers starred Robert Redford, Ben Kingsley, Sidney Poitier, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, and included a brief appearance of James Earl Jones.

The movie opens with student hackers and longtime friends Martin Brice (Redford) and Cosmo (Kingsley) using their skills to redistribute money from organizations they consider evil to underfunded altruistic ones that help the world.

They were basically a 1969 hacker version of Robin Hood.

When Martin steps out to get pizza, since all good hacks are powered by pizza, the police arrive and arrest Cosmo, forcing Martin into hiding.

Fast forward a few decades, Martin, now living in San Francisco under the alias Martin Bishop, leads a rag-tag network penetration-testing security team (sorta like “red teaming” today) that includes former CIA operative Donald Crease (Poitier), technician and conspiracy theorist Darren “Mother” Roskow (Aykroyd), hacking prodigy Carl Arbogast (Phoenix), and blind phone phreaker Irwin “Whistler” Emery (Strathairn).

NSA agents approach Martin and reveal they know his true identity.

They offer to clear his record if he and his team recover a Russian-funded black box device, codenamed Setec Astronomy.

With help from ex-girlfriend Liz (McDonnell), Martin and his team steal the device, only to discover it is a codebreaker capable of penetrating even the most secure networks.

Realizing that “Setec Astronomy” is an anagram of “too many secrets”, Crease locks everyone in the office until the device can be handed over to the NSA.

Further antics ensue.

It’s a fun movie.

I suspect, like a lot of nerds, I’ve used quotes from Sneakers as inspiration for passwords and passphrases.

The movie’s portrayal of social engineering and hacking was reasonably realistic for the 1990s.

However, the Setec Astronomy black box was very much science fiction, not a mathematically or hardware-wise possibility at the time.

Google enters the chat.

In March, Google wrote a blog post warning that quantum computers, like the ones it is building internally, will pose a “significant threat to current cryptographic standards” before the end of the decade.

I guess Google knows something the rest of us don’t, yet.

They went on to say, “The encryption currently used to keep your information confidential and secure could easily be broken by a large-scale quantum computer in coming years.”

Google said: “We’ve adjusted our threat model to prioritize post-quantum cryptography migration for authentication services – an important component of online security and digital signature migrations. We recommend that other engineering teams follow suit.”

Basically, Google warned the global military, banking, and business security infrastructure world that they think they are just a few steps away from building a quantum version of Setec Astronomy, a system so fast and so capable that it could hack any non-quantum system before you can order your hacker buddies some pizza.

Anthropic enters the chat.

Earlier this month, Anthropic announced Mythos, a new, advanced AI model equipped with sophisticated capabilities and designed for defensive cybersecurity tasks, vulnerability analysis, and threat detection.

Anthropic said Mythos can identify and exploit vulnerabilities “in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so.”

Anthropic quickly realized that this new model might be too powerful to release into the wild, so it did something unprecedented: it lent the model to its competition.

Anthropic shared a Mythos Preview with folks like Google, Amazon, ​Microsoft, Nvidia, and Apple through a new initiative ​called “Project Glasswing”.

They also extended access to more than 40 additional organizations that build or maintain ​critical software infrastructure.

Anthropic said that they “formed Project Glasswing because of capabilities we’ve observed in a new frontier model trained by Anthropic that we believe could reshape cybersecurity. Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.”

In one hot-off-the-press example, Mozilla said on Tuesday that its latest Firefox browser release includes protections against 271 vulnerabilities it identified through early access to Anthropic’s Mythos Preview.

Begging the question, how many vulnerabilities does your company’s infrastructure have?

The Firefox team says it has taken a lot of work to adapt to the deluge of bugs these new AI tools uncovered, but that this big lift is necessary for the security of Mozilla’s users, given that these capabilities will inevitably fall into attackers’ hands soon.

Just after Mozilla’s statement, an anonymous group of Discord users says it hacked its way into the Claude Mythos Preview.

The users gained access to Mythos through a mix of tactics, including using access one of them had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and using internet sleuthing tools.

They effectively used the now age-old social engineering tools depicted in Sneakers to tap into Mythos.

No quantum computer required.

Anthropic is investigating the report of unauthorized access, and the company says it currently has no evidence that the access is impacting any of its systems.

Sneakers, as a film, is a bit schlocky.

But there was a lot of truth in the script, and the cast is fantastic.

As Ben Kingsley’s character Cosmo said, “There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... It’s all about the information!”

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