Vanity Fair investigates whether Lisbeth Salander could actually pull off the crazy hacks in Stieg Larsson’s bestselling books:
Anyone who has read the late Stieg Larsson’s vastly entertaining Girl With … novels knows that the titular character, Lisbeth Salander, is a hero for our Internet-addicted era: a virtuoso hacker who uses her near-omnipotent mastery of cyberspace to compensate for her generally appalling social skills. Again and again, Salander breaks into closed corporate networks, acquires off-limits records, and all but effortlessly gains open-ended access to hard drives belonging to friends and foes alike.
All of which got me thinking, Holy crap, can hackers really do all this stuff? So I placed a call to Kevin Poulsen, a reformed “black hat” hacker who now edits Wired.com’s Threat Level blog. Poulsen, who once rigged a radio contest so that he would be guaranteed to win a Porsche, was kind enough to assuage some of my fears (no, a hacker probably won’t arrange for Snooki to win best actress) while reinforcing quite a few others.
This answer neatly sums up what I thought while reading Larsson’s books:
The interesting thing is, everything that she does is completely plausible—it’s the way she does it that is for the most part completely nonsensical as a technical matter.
The books—at least the first two, I haven’t read the third yet—are basically accurate in the types of things they describe Lisbeth doing, and the amount of work required to do them, but the details are all wrong. This feels more accurate to me than a story like “Die Hard 4”, “Ocean’s Eleven”, or “Swordfish”, which describe hard or impossible feats of engineering as if it’s a matter of running the right software and clicking the right buttons.
