WarGames (1983)
loresecurityops culture
The film in which a Seattle teenager dials into what he thinks is a games company and reaches a NORAD war-planning computer, nearly starting a nuclear exchange before teaching the machine that some games cannot be won.
No other work of fiction has moved computer security further. President Reagan watched it, asked his Joint Chiefs whether it could really happen, and the answer led to NSDD-145, the first US national policy on computer security, with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act arriving in its wake. It gave the world the phrase war dialing, the sentence 'Shall we play a game?', and a generation's decision to get a modem. Its release also coincided with the 414s arrests, so the newspapers had a real story and a movie poster on the same week.
Also known as: war games, joshua, shall we play a game, wardialing