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closest thing we had to it was arrested in a Mcdonalds because some dumbass making less than 12 dollars and hour dropped a dime on him.
Can't have robin hood without some class solidarity.
Luigi is innocent, we were playing videogames together
He really shouldn't have stopped in Allentown. That's the redneck meth capital of PA.
And modern day guillotine while at it.
The neat thing is that guillotine technology has advanced quite far since the French revolution
I need to rewatch Tucker and Dale vs Evil.
That movie really is special
I really hate that the exaggerated future of Watchdogs is becoming reality but not the exaggerated group of highly experienced black hat hackers doing crazy post compromise shenanigans that would make national news.
The problem is the same reason why a Robin Hood type of character already doesn't really exist in modern history. There will always be thousands of highly skilled people in defense of the very system you wish to see dissolved.
You would need the resources of at least a highly advanced APT, which often means you're funded by a nation state which has very specific compromise goals.
Everyone else falls into cybercrime, which is much less sophisticated and is almost always after money.
Hence why most highly publicized attacks end in bitcoin ransoms.
EDIT:
Also at the risk of giving too much info about my career, big banks are absolutely notorious for having extremely tight security. Even if you managed to jump over the custom EDR, pivot your way through a massive amount of proprietary systems, and land in a suitable position to carry out the motherload of a supply chain attack, the bank could just halt their infrastructure and manually nullify whatever transactions they want with full backing from the government.
The closest I ever hypothetically witnessed was being able to manipulate the loan data for a small credit union. And emphasis on hypothetical, a real attacker would have needed some hard internal access to a heavily restricted subnet.
The only way I can see this successfully happening is like if the Chief Network Architect of say Chase also happened to be a highly competent hacker who uses his decades of experience to formulate a plan with an APT over the course of several years.
I really hate that the exaggerated future of Watchdogs is becoming reality but not the exaggerated group of highly experienced black hat hackers doing crazy post compromise shenanigans that would make national news.
The problem is the same reason why a Robin Hood type of character already doesn't really exist in modern history.
Huh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec
As someone who has also been all up inside bank infrastructure I can agree with the rest of your post, the complexity to access some of those proprietary boxes would almost not be worth it, especially with things like offsite backups.
Yeah I know about them, and they were actually the inspiration for Dedsec in Watchdogs, but they shuttered after the FBI caught one and flipped him real quick lol.
I could be wrong, but I don't think we ever really saw a group like LulzSec again with the same level of notoriety and success.
Fuck Sabu, all my homies hate Sabu
That's fair, as you said most are smashed these days by capitalism and thus focus on ransomware.
The thing is if a group wanted to remain in operation, being public is against their own interest. Back then it was easier to get away with things. Cloudflare wasn't as advanced/heavily utilized, load balancers weren't considered and lots of old architecture riddled with vulns made things fun. Web security was also extremely poor via xss.
Having worked with highly regulated industries like banking, health care, and others that a “Robin Hood” hacker would target I can say that it’s not feasible.
Do you know how many days of Zoom meetings they’d have to be on to compromise just one system?
That's management. The actual physical RFID card generator is on an employee's Windows laptop with the password sticky noted on the screen.
Okay so now you’re in one system in one company. And that person still needs approval and a four hour zoom call to push anything into a position where it can make a difference.
I know, I’ve been on dozens of calls like that.
And even then you’ve pwned one of about a dozen companies you’d need to make a dent.
And then some dickhole will rat you out to the FBI for leniency.
And that person still needs approval and a four hour zoom call to push anything into a position where it can make a difference.
You don't need approval when you are a criminal and have used exploits to gain root access to the company's computers.
You think Aaron Swartz was on Zoom meetings to get approval before picking the lock to the network closet, hacking root and downloading all the University's public research papers?
You think ShinyHunters are on Zoom meetings asking for approval? https://cybernews.com/security/software-11m-students-hacked-shinyhunters-attack/
This is you:
"No one can rob a bank. Think of the meetings needed to get HR to approve bringing a gun in the building."
Downloading a bunch of data from educational systems is significantly easier than getting exploits into banks and financial systems, which is what I assumed a Robin Hood hacker would be doing.
Banks are hacked too:
edit:
In one episode of Mr Robot, they setup a fake cell tower and steal sims to bypass the 2 factor authentication on the cell phone of the people they stole from.
This actually happens in the real world: https://apnews.com/article/fraud-identity-theft-fcc-wireless-providers-8df930f2983d589c4822bba53eedfc1b
Again no Zoom meetings about stealing the SIM in your cell phone.
Another data theft, which is not what people envision when they think “Robin Hood.”
They’re picturing a Mr. Robot-like restructuring of the financial system, or even just eliminating debt like was proposed in Sneakers, or maybe just moving money around like that one episode of SeaQuest with Tim Russ.
And to do that you need a lot of people to get code anywhere near production, and everything is audited, and the timelines are measured in quarters.
And then you need to do it for the rest of the banks in the system. Mr Robot only worked because Ecorp was a monopoly.
Or they could just ransomware the money from the big companies and give it away
I guess if you’re okay with getting caught
We had one, his name was Aaron Swartz.
He did great work, had awesome projects. But he pissed off some of the powers that be, and they decided to litigate. They did what they could to crush him and it worked. Ultimately he committed suicide in prison.
I think we never deserved him and he knew it.
Now I think the best we have is Cory Doctorow, but he's more of an open source tech evangelist than a hacker. He's fighting the good fight, but not by building things.
We need to not expect some hero figure to appear and change our world for us.
They exist, but they're also are on 4chan, so it's a wash.
You know how hard it is to hack with bow and arrow?
https://gamerant.com/hawkeye-best-trick-arrows-from-comics-mcu/
There are tons, op. Getting ahold of a corporate card and ordering strangers (maybe you're one of them, maybe you aren't) presents is a classic for a reason. You just never hear about victories of the resistance, that's kinda propaganda 101
I was just thinking about all the industrial spying China has done over the years. Would be awful if someone released their secrets for battery tech in their cars (if they actually exist).
Or billions of studies being hosted on torrent sites, oh the misery of publishers
Be the change you want to see in the world.
We already kinda do.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Showerthoughts
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