Companies and individuals spend a lot of time and money on security. They do surveys, come up with more secure cryptographic protocols and superb little utilities so that crackers cannot sniff out passwords and wreak havoc. They even educate users on choosing good passwords and warn them about "social engineering".
Then Swordfish comes out.
Nevermind the movie appears to be a terrible sinking of money into a poor plot, a cliched Travolta, gratuitous and rather unnecessary display of nudity and a banal media portrayal of hackers. It is Hollywood - if not forgivable, it is at least understandable. What isn't so easy to forgive is to watch an entire community of entries in /etc/passwd, painstakingly varied with years of user education, revert to a mere 4096 salted variations of the word, "swordfish", thank you Chico.
Its all a conspiracy I tell you. A ploy by The Big Boys. They seem to be saying, sure - bring on your gazillion bits of encryption - we'll brainwash the suckers before you can say random pass phrase.
Does anyone know what in the world, dropping through a 1024-bit firewall means anyways?