In War Games, the 1983 science-fiction film, Matthew Broderick stars as an unmotivated high school student who, with the help of Ally Sheedy and some other friends, unwittingly hacks into a U.S. military computer that has automated command of the United States’ nuclear missile silos. Believing that he has accessed a set of advanced computer games, Broderick’s character selects Global Thermonuclear War and begins playing what he believes is a simulation of the start of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the risk of spoiling the ending for those who have not seen the movie, it turns out that Broderick’s character may have started the real thing and he and Ally Sheedy’s character spend the rest of the movie racing around to prevent the mutually assured destruction that a nuclear war would bring.
In the 30 years since War Games was first released, computer networks have become far more advanced. Likewise, those who are intent on hacking into computer systems have become incredibly more sophisticated. While not every network security breach poses a risk of global nuclear war, the risk of security breaches has become a serious concern for any commercial enterprise that maintains private records in digital form.
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