The Movie War Games Inspired President Reagan To Take Cybersecurity Seriously

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28352/war-games-the-film-that-inspired-reagan-to-take-cybersecurity-seriously-turns-36-today

By Tyler Rogoway
The War Zone
June 3, 2019

On this day, June 3rd, 1983, War Games starring Matthew Broderick hit big 
screens across the United States. The movie had all the staples of a 1980s Cold 
War techno-thriller—a super powerful, blunt, and ruthless military-industrial 
complex, cutting-edge tech way beyond reality for the time, computers and more 
computers, and of course, 'super kids' that play the film's protagonists and 
the main problem solvers. The movie actually spoke to an ever more glaring 
reality of the time, that a major nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would 
end in a world-shattering loss of life. The film's most memorable line, voiced 
by a computer, underscored just how depraved the stakes were: "The only winning 
move is not to play."

At its core, War Games was about hacking and the vulnerability of networks and 
computers themselves. I mean, the whole plot begins with high school age 
Matthew Broderick's character hacking into NORAD's computer network from his 
early 1980s personal computer in his bedroom. This cyber vulnerability plot 
point ended up changing the course of U.S. national security events.

​​​Fred Kaplan, author Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War - also a 
guy who a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism - recounts how President 
Reagan's screening of the film on June 4th, 1983 at Camp David ended up having 
a major impact on U.S. cybersecurity and defense policy going forward:

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