S.P.E.C.T.R.E, the latest James Bond to date (2015) is a classic vintage 007 movies. A lot of action, and few computer spotting opportunities. The most interesting one takes place while Daniel Craig (James Bond) is trying to save Léa Seydoux (Madeleine) from an explosive ending orchestrated by Christoph Waltz (Blofeld). M’s (Ralph Fiennes) quartermaster (Ben Whishaw a.k.a. Q) tries indeed to disable the planetary surveillance system built with love by Andrew Scott (C). And he does it without breaking a sweat! Not a big deal if you know that the SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion software runs on Linux (CentOS?). Because Blofeld and C are BFFs, S.P.E.C.T.R.E malicious code is graciously hosted by the British security service (MI5 – Military Intelligence, Section 5). But God Save the Queen, Q has root access there as well, so he can shut down, unmount IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS), and even kill that stubborn process 4417. By the way, who stole /dev/hdc? Although Q uses exclusively the console to manage the renegade network, it is hard to call out liberties taken with reality – such as the fishy IP addresses – since I do not know which CNS we are looking at: Caching Name Server from Nominum, Cisco’s Configuration Engine or Cambium Networks’ CNS Server management system? And I am sure there are plenty other plausible candidates, I love 3-letter acronyms :). Network Gurus, please shim in at any time. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Q can claim victory with a nice red and shiny SYSTEM ERADICATED message. Good job Q!
