GoKawiilNmap In The Movies
For reasons unknown, Hollywood has decided that Nmap is the tool to show whenever hacking scenes are needed. At least it is a lot more realistic than silly 3D animation approach used in many previous movies (e.g. "hacking the Gibson" on Hackers, or the much worse portrayals on Swordfish). We always like to see Nmap in the movies, so we have catalogued known instances here.
If you catch Nmap in another flick, please mail Fyodor.
Update (April 21, 2020): I (Fyodor) am way behind on adding new movies. Sorry about that!
Movie script writers, artists, and digital asset managers are also welcome to email Fyodor for advice. We've been pleased to help out to make a number of movies slightly more realistic and entertaining by improving the hacking scenes.
This page only covers movies, we have a separate page coving news articles, reviews, books, and popular culture references.
Matrix Reloaded
While Nmap had been used in some previous obscure movies, it was The Matrix Reloaded (Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon) which really turned Nmap into a movie star!
We have all seen many movies like Hackers which pass off ridiculous 3D animated eye-candy scenes as hacking. So Fyodor was shocked to find that Trinity does it properly in The Matrix Reloaded. Needing to hack the city power grid, she whips out Nmap version 2.54BETA25, uses it to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then proceeds to exploit it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001. Shame on the city for being vulnerable (timing notes).
A video of the exploit is available on YouTube or as matrix-nmap.mp4. Click on the following thumbnails for higher resolution or view more pictures here.
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