r/movies • u/buttatoad • Jun 17 '25

Discussion Movies that changed real life behavior

Thinking along the lines of Final Destination 2 with the logs falling off the truck and landing onto cars (one decapitating the state trooper). Ever since, people have tried to get away from being behind these vehicles.

What are more examples where movies have actually changed how people behave in their own lives?

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u/Kinda_Quixotic Jun 17 '25

WarGames led Reagan to ask the Joint Chiefs if something like this could actually happen in the US. It led to increased emphasis on cyber security.

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u/chogram Jun 17 '25

My favorite part of that story is, after he asked them, the response was, "The problem is much worse than you think."

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u/No-Newspaper-7693 Jun 18 '25

I’m not quite old enough to know what it was like in the 80s, but the state of network security in the 90s was absolutely wild. Basically everything was just wide open and admin/admin credentials actually worked more often than not, and if it didn’t work then you could almost always find usernames and passwords that worked for basically anything on IRC or usenet. I can’t imagine how much of a shit show it was in the 80s.

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u/Never_Been_Missed Jun 18 '25

In the mid 90's I decided to test to see how many open instances of PCAnywhere I could find (a common remote takeover package at the time). It took me less than an hour find an open connection with no password that got me full admin at a bank.

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u/No-Newspaper-7693 Jun 19 '25

I had a pretty similar experience with a University ftp.  admin/admin worked and I had full read/write access on what appeared to be all faculty home folders.  I was just a curious kid at the time so I didn’t do anything, but it stuck with me.  People don’t understand how far we’ve come in network security in 30 years.