Last week, I watched a movie called "All In", and to be honest, I felt a mix of emotions after watching it...
The development and application of technology can bring many positive impacts to our lives, but at the same time, it can also be used in negative and harmful ways, which can be disastrous.
Today, I'm going to take stock of the technology stack that appears in the movie, so that you can have a better viewing experience after understanding these technologies.
This article contains spoilers, so if you're planning to watch the original movie in the cinema, you can bookmark this article and come back to read it after watching the movie.
SQL Injection Attack#
After being treated unfairly, Pan Sheng hacked into the hotel's internal system and tampered with the projection information at the meeting.
From the limited visual information, it is not difficult to see that Pan Sheng used SQL injection to attack the hotel's management system and gained admin privileges.
From this image, you can almost see the complete command line instructions:
python sqlmap.py -u "https://pms.arey-hilmon.com/orders/detail?id=13260994" --random-agent --batch -D pms_arey-hilman_com -T users -C "username,password" –drop
Through Pan Sheng's attack, I'm sure everyone knows what the admin password for the hotel's internal management is now, right?
Web Scraping#
After arriving in "Mianbei," Pan Sheng was forced to write a web scraper to collect information from a subtitle group.
In the movie, the X-pider web scraping tool is mentioned, but I haven't heard of it in real life. It could be a tool created specifically for the movie or a framework developed by Pan Sheng himself.
In the movie, after Pan Sheng scrapes the email addresses of the subtitle group, the "Mianbei" group sends them "cooperation" emails, offering rewards to the subtitle group in exchange for embedding "advertisements".
Automated Phishing Program#
In the later part of the movie, Pan Sheng proposes a partnership with Manager Lu to carry out scams and writes an automated phishing program. It aims to use AI and algorithms to automate a large part of the manual work.
However, the released workers end up being sold to another scam group...
With today's technology, it is indeed possible that in a group of hundreds of users, everyone except you is a bot (AI).
The Most Powerful Technology in the Movie#
None of the aforementioned technologies are the most powerful in the movie.
In the movie, and even in real life, the most powerful technology is probably social engineering attacks.
Social engineering attacks are network attacks carried out using "social engineering" techniques.
In computer science, social engineering refers to the use of legitimate communication with others to influence their psychology and make them take certain actions or reveal confidential information.
That's why Pan Sheng, despite his high intelligence, was easily deceived by the "Mianbei" group.
Because the "Mianbei" group probably knows Pan Sheng even better than he knows himself, understanding his strengths and weaknesses.
The reason why the female lead, Anna, was deceived into going to "Mianbei" is different from Pan Sheng. Anna went to "Mianbei" voluntarily after falling into a trap.
And that trap was tailor-made for Anna, with one layer after another.
Final Thoughts#
Some people say, "As long as you're not greedy, you won't be deceived," and that is partly true. But I believe it is more important to protect personal information from being leaked.
If your personal information is leaked and malicious individuals use it to come up with schemes to deceive you or your family, the consequences can be unimaginable.
For example:
If all the information about my family is leaked, and then a scammer calls my mom and says that I'm in trouble and need bail money, my mom might just send the money when she can't reach me on the phone.
This scheme could be completed in just 20 minutes.
And that's just an example of a scam from a few years ago. I imagine the schemes nowadays are even more sophisticated.