Is Kevin McCallister the Greatest Hacker in Movie History?
There may not be any computers in Home Alone, but few movie characters embody the old-school hacker ethos like Kevin McCallister does.
Editor
Dennis Fisher is an award-winning journalist and author. He is one of the co-founders of Decipher and Threatpost and has been writing about cybersecurity since 2000. Dennis enjoys finding the stories behind the headlines and digging into the motivations and thinking of both defenders and attackers. He is the author of 2.5 novels and once met Shaq. Contact: dennis at decipher.sc.
There may not be any computers in Home Alone, but few movie characters embody the old-school hacker ethos like Kevin McCallister does.
As we ease into the holidays, the security news doesn’t stop coming. This week we discuss the research from AWS threat intelligence on Russian adversaries targeting a variety of network edge devices for opportunistic exploitation, then we break down attacks by a Chinese threat actor that target a new zero day in Cisco’s AsyncOS, and finally we discuss the […]
Pete Baker and Zoe Lindsey join Dennis Fisher on the roof of Nakatomi Plaza to discuss one of the great action classics* and a beloved movie in the hacker community: Die Hard. Yippee ki-yay! *Not a Christmas movie
It was 30 years ago this week that Michael Mann's masterpiece Heat hit theaters like a semi T-boning an armored car. In addition to being a masterful heist movie and insightful depiction of the toll that obsession can exact, Heat is also a criminally underrated hacker movie.
This week gave us the gift of some more React Server Components vulnerabilities and further exploitation of the previously disclosed bugs by a variety of threat groups. There were also a long list of vulnerabilities disclosed by Microsoft, Adobe, and others, which we discuss in the context of how difficult vulnerability management is right now. […]
December 12, 2025 | 1 min read
Coming from a military family, Erin Whitmore was prepared for a career of service. But her path took her not into the military, but the intelligence community, first in the private sector supporting the DIA and NGA, and later as a cybersecurty program manager in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She eventually […]