Watching WarGames now as an adult, I can see that Dr. Falken practiced horribly bad password management - the name of his dead son, which of course was correctly guessed and as a result nearly started WWIII.
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Let me tell you about my mother!
LOL
The computer used there in that scene is Televideo TS-803. I still have a working one. Boasted a CP/M operating system with 4K of RAM and a 8MHz CPU. Yeah, it wasnât really capable of any kind of graphics - especially the kind shown in this scene, except for some basic lines and suchlike. Still, I learnt to program using that machine, and it set my course in a career in software developmentâŚ
And Goldeneye, that was some fine 90s annoying-beep hacking.
âSpike them!â - said Boris hoping it would catch on.
Computer nonsense that bothered me but isnât really about hacking is in Independance Day when they are receiving a signal at the beginning and the beeping monitor tell them stright up that itâs coming from THE MOON. Chuh, like you know. Just give me the coordinates and Iâll make my own assumptions thanks, mr 90s computer.
Thank you thank you thank you for including one of my all time favorite movies, Electric Dreams in the mix. Here for your pleasure is my favorite song from the AMAZING soundtrack by Giorgio Morodor
Right? Of course, nowadays that could never happen. Heâd have to put in a âcat sat on my keyboardâ password, but the hackers could go in and change the password using the password retrieval questions like, âWhat is your motherâs maiden name?â âWhat street did you grow up on?â or âWhat is the name of your dead son?â.
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Or call the helpdesk and get the password reset. Pose as himself or as a technician working on his account. Standard social engineering approaches apply.
But that would be a con man movie, not a hacker movie. Completely different genre.
Ask Kevin Mitnick. 
See e.g. The Art of Deception, one of his books.
Iâd say that there is enough overlap to consider it the same overall problematics. The system involves both the machines and the people, in all sorts of levels (zero-day hole, unpatched old hole, misconfig, forgotten test account, guessable password, password stolen from a saved password on a home machine (one of webs I was adminning was hacked this way, apparently a worm got hold of a saved FTP password), infected USB disk (âyay, free thumbdrive!â), tricking the helpdesk monkey, going through targetâs trash, or walking right through the front door with suitable fake paperwork. Or getting employed there under a pretense. Or going through a friend in a three-letter agency. Or hacking or social-engineering such agency. Or about three billions of other options.)
The technical and human attacks are orthogonal approaches, best used together.
Yeah, yeah, but a conman protagonist is a slick people person while a hacker protagonist is an arrogant genius that doesnât related to people. How can we resolve these tropes for our movie?
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Easy: two protagonists!
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