Subj : Evil Dead Rise analogous to hacking
To   : All
From : Ogg
Date : Fri Apr 28 2023 19:22:00

>==================================================================<
 ** Original area               : "/grc/securitynow"
 ** Original message from       : aarch128@nospam.net (aarch128)
 ** Original message to         :
 ** Original date/time          : 24 Apr 23, 08:58
>==================================================================<

I just watched Evil Dead Rise, the new movie about demonic possession, 
and I realized how similar it was to a really bad computer hacking incident.

A boy finds a vinyl audio disc and book-of-the-dead in a secret vault 
opened by an earthquake in Los Angeles, and he plays the disc on his 
turntable, causing incantations to be played that awaken a demon and set 
it loose. He tries to stop the playback but the turntable becomes 
controlled by the demon and won't stop playing.

This is rather like if a kid finds a DVD-ROM in an unused locker at 
school, then takes it home and pops it into his personal Windows PC, 
whereupon a hacking program takes over the PC and he can't eject it or 
even reboot.

The demon then takes over his mother and she goes nuts. The demon shuts 
down the landline phone (no one has cell phones, oddly). From the 
mother, the demon jumps from person to person, typically after the 
mother injures each one. The demon takes over their bodies, and turns 
them into its (meat) puppets.

This is similar to a hacking program reaching let's say the Wifi router 
and taking control of that by injecting code via some factory-provided 
backdoor, shutting down Internet access, after which it starts scanning 
all devices on the network for vulnerabilities and hacks each one, e.g. 
causing some shellcode to be executed on the victim device.

Finally (spoiler alert) the heroine finds a recording on the vinyl disc 
of a priest explaining that the bodies of the possessed reanimated 
people have to be destroyed, and she manages to push the bodies into a 
wood pulper that just happens to be in the parking garage of their Los 
Angeles apartment complex.

This is equivalent to a computer security expert coming in and 
completely wiping the infected computers and perhaps even reprogram 
their firmware, and when that solution fails, he puts the hard drives 
into a metal shredder and sends the computers to the landfill.

In summary, I think if you take a detailed news story about a bad 
computer hacking incident, where device after device was taken over, 
replace "computer" with "person" and hacking program with "demon" you 
*could* have most of what you need for a demonic possession horror movie 
script.

However if you want to write a script about a zombie apocalypse you 
might want to look at the way in which Macbook and iPad users descend 
upon Starbucks coffee houses and consume inordinate amounts of coffee 
i.e. braaains. Now that is the stuff of nightmares.


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