8 Best Hacker Movies

1. The Italian Job (1969). This movie, while old, features a clever use of hacking by a computer expert to take out all the traffic lights in Turin, creating a traffic jam that keeps the police from capturing the thieves.


2. War Games (1983). The quintessential hacker movie, beloved by several generations of computer programmers. Mathew Broderick is a Seattle high school student who unwittingly begins a game of global thermonuclear war with a NORAD computer when all he wants to do is play an unreleased video game. A nice romp through old tech, especially the 300-baud modem that keeps pinging him back.


3. Sneakers (1992). A fantastic, convoluted and thoroughly satisfying caper movie that just happens to feature everyone from Robert Redford to Sidney Poitier. Redford is a prototypical white hat hacker, doing penetration testing on corporations. But it's all the bits and pieces that make it so much fun. Especially great is Dan Aykroyd as "Mother," a wacky conspiracy theorist and electronics genius.


4. Hackers (1995). This is more in the cyberpunk vein, with lots of cross-dressing, indeterminate gender youth on skateboards whizzing through a dark New York. They also happen to have amazing hacker chops and presumably all grew up to be millionaire Google staffers. The film's nicely done with a good story line. It captures some of the hacker underground culture of the early 1990s and used computer graphics to try to get across plot points that hinge on actual computer knowledge. Still, for many it's remembered as one of Angelina Jolie first film roles, as hacker Kate Libby.


5. The Net (1995). This was one of Sandra Bullocks' first movies. In it, she plays a systems analyst who telecommutes to a programming job in San Francisco. The story's excellent, though the use of 3.5-inch floppy disks and pre-Web Internet connections will be puzzling to some younger viewers.


6. The Matrix (1999). It's unclear if the Matrix really belongs in a list of hacker films. After all, while Neo is a computer programmer, the movie is not so much about people hacking computers as computers hacking people. Still, it's wicked cool (at least the first one was) and there are lots of computers. And how can we leave it out?


7. Swordfish (2001). This is Hackers meets Pulp Fiction. Lots of gunfire, things blowing up, computer viruses, John Travolta and Halle Berry. As seems typical for these kinds of movies, the white hat hacker (Hugh Jackman) is a former convict who has to be threatened to work for the black hats.


8. Life Free or Die Hard (2007). This is kind of two movies in one. Bruce Willis gets to do the Die Hard thing, while Justin Long and Timothy Olyphant are doing the white hat/black hat thing. When the hacking gets a tad dull, something blows up, when you're tired of explosions, there's nifty computer stuff. What's not to like?

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/01/14/hacking-movies-list-cyber-blackhat/21713327/