Elliot's first hack in Mr. Robot was based on Kor Adana's own
“Years later in the writer's room for Mr. Robot, and you'll see this in season two, I think it's the fourth episode, fourth or fifth episode, in the beginning where there's this VO of Elliot talking about his first major hack. And he's like, I broke into my lib…”
Elliot Alderson's cybersecurity role in Mr. Robot mirrored Kor Adana's job
“And Sam didn't know that I had a previous life as like a cyber security, you know, cyber security guy. And basically what Elliot did on the show was my old job.”
Mr. Robot shot all computer screens practically, avoiding green screens entirely
“We shoot everything practically on Mr. Robot, meaning we don't shoot green screens, we don't burn anything in in post.”
Mr. Robot used interactive Flash animations for on-screen terminal hacking scenes
“The way we achieve that is through flash animation. So I'll work closely with an animator to create an interactive demo, basically, where everything looks legit, like, looks like a real desktop environment, looks like a real terminal window, but it's not. It's…”
Designing the opening hack in Mr. Robot Season 2 took two months
“In season two, I think it was the first scene in episode two of four. So that would be 2.3. And it's the one I referenced earlier of him talking with the voiceover about his first hack and he has four terminal screen windows open up. He has exploit code in one…”
Mr. Robot screen code compiles but intentionally omits steps to prevent attacks
“I mean, the code that we're using, yes. But we're not going to show, we never show enough”
Television production is the only justifiable remaining use case for Adobe Flash
“The only thing that you would ever want to
Use flash for is working on a television show like Mr. Robot”
Every URL and QR code in Mr. Robot leads to interactive puzzles
“Any URL, web address, IP address, host name that you see on any of our screens, any QR code, any barcode that you see anywhere on the show in the frame of Mr. Robot will lead you somewhere and it will lead you to a puzzle.”
Mr. Robot Season 2 ARG Flashed Linux Crash Screens Containing Hidden URL
“And it was just the sequence where we flashed like a frame of a piece, like a bunch of different screens, like crash screens of like a Linux system crashing. And if you found the right character on each of those screens in order, it would lead you to another U…”
Mr. Robot incorporates recent cyber exploits by assuming characters discovered them early
“We sort of fudge it because Okay, maybe it was not disclosed at that time, but, you know, hackers were still aware of it, or the community, like certain members of the community were aware of it, and we can just say that Elliott and F Society, you know, were a…”
Mr. Robot's on-screen code snippets can be found in full on GitHub
“If you were to just screenshot a bit of our code or a bit of source code that's on one of the screens and research it, you'll Be able to find it on GitHub. You'll be able to find it somewhere in its entirety.”
McManus: Mr. Robot is the gold standard for television technical accuracy
“One is Mr. Robot. And even when I was on Silicon Valley, I kind of said like, this is the gold standard for both playback and technical accuracy.”