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We’ve looked at information-security cases and technologies through the lens of famous movies, popular book series, and even fairy tales more than once before. Next up it’s the turn of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey (based on the ancient Greek epic poem), which, incidentally, inspired the works of Tolkien, various movies and series in the Star Wars franchise, and much more.
Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t just describe classic plots and archetypes. It also covers key technologies and principles of digital hygiene — albeit in veiled form. The hero’s journey was a risky business — and so, for that matter, is watching The Odyssey itself, but we’ll get to that at the end of this post. For now, let’s see how to safely sail the vast internet Hellenic seas in search of Ithaca.
Administrator Penelope and 108 attackers
Nolan has reshaped the poem’s structure quite a bit, but the film still opens on the island of Ithaca. There, Penelope and Telemachus, the wife and son of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, wait for him to return from the Trojan War. Meanwhile, a mob of 108 suitors is running riot in Odysseus’ house. They’re all courting Penelope and dreaming of the throne, and the whole kingdom is on the brink of collapse.
In essence, this is an attack on digital infrastructure by a group of malicious actors. Penelope, an advanced user with admin rights, does everything she can to block attempts to hack the root account take Odysseus’ place. Her trick: she’s promised to choose a husband only after she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’ father, Laertes. By day, she weaves in front of everyone. By night, she unravels everything she’s done: clearly a daily factory reset.
Nolan gives Penelope even more authority than Homer did. This helps highlight the coming-of-age story of Telemachus, who starts out as a beginner user. His storyline is about searching for his father and recognizing him: the ancient Greek version of multi-factor authentication. Following the tradition set by James Joyce, Nolan focuses on the tragedy of Telemachus, who can’t remember Odysseus, since his father last connected to the server left Ithaca so long ago.
Root account Odysseus, Trojan Horse, and Ram VPN
Meanwhile, Odysseus is on the island of the nymph Calypso. She feeds him lotus flowers that make him gradually lose his memory — clearly the classic playbook of ransomware. But in seven years, Calypso never manages to fully encrypt wipe his memory. Odysseus longs for home, and the hapless ransomware operator ends up helping him partly recover the encrypted data remember his story. Odysseus remembers how, after ten years of war outside the walls of Troy, he came up with a cunning scheme that became the basis for all Trojan horses ever since…
The Greeks left a malicious file huge wooden horse on the shore and sailed away. A spy who stayed behind convinced the Trojans that it was a very useful thing an offering to Athena, and they dragged the horse into the city. At night, once the people of Troy had gone into sleep mode, the malicious modules soldiers led by Odysseus hidden inside the horse added themselves to Defender’s exclusions opened the gates. The Greeks returned and captured Troy, then stole data and cryptocurrency burned and looted the city. Only after that did they finally head home.
But the road to Ithaca was long and dangerous. After landing on an unfamiliar island, Odysseus got overconfident. Instead of leaving the suspicious site stocking up and sailing away, he went off to explore the infrastructure, and ended up trapped with his men in the cave of a giant Cyclops, known online as Polyphemus. The Greeks managed to blind the Cyclops, though not without losses, and Odysseus figured out how to get out of the cave: by hiding under the bellies of the rams. The blinded Cyclops felt the rams’ wool but never noticed the Greeks — a textbook example of how a VPN works.
But once he’s out of the cave, Odysseus gets cocky and fires an arrow at Polyphemus. That gives away his real IP address location, and his crew has to flee in a hurry from the furious Cyclops. In the end, the ships are knocked off course and get lost at sea.
Interestingly, unlike in the film, Homer’s poem has a group of OLYMP experts constantly steering the course of events. For example, Odysseus’ ships lost their way because of the interference of Poseidon, OLYMP’s chief expert in maritime technology. As we know from the poem, Odysseus first logged in to Polyphemus’ place as “Nub_Oddy”, but later, in a fit of arrogance, changed his username to “Odysseus_Son_of_Laertes_King_of_Ithaca”. With Odysseus deanonymized, the Cyclops used the Pray messaging app to send Poseidon a voice request to launch targeted attacks on Odysseus’ crew. In Nolan’s version, though, Poseidon doesn’t appear as a character. Instead, he becomes a metaphor for an APT a destructive force of nature.
Expert Circe, APT group Sirena, Scylla, and Charybdis malware
Odysseus’ ships drift across the vast Web seas, and every so often they land on unsafe sites shores. First comes the bay of Lamos, where the giant Laestrygonians launch a DDoS attack, hurling requests rocks at the Greeks and wiping out nearly all of Odysseus’ infrastructure crew. Only he and a small group survive.
Next, the heroes land on the island of a lone cybersecurity professional known as Circe, who puts them through harsh cybersecurity training. She lures Odysseus’ warriors to dinner with a social engineering scheme known as pig butchering and turns them into… yes, you guessed it, pigs. But the protagonist doesn’t fall for her tricks, so Circe agrees to help him and gives his crew their human form back. She also advises Odysseus to run an analysis in an isolated environment descend into Hades’ underworld and find the blind Tiresias, whom the OLYMP experts promoted to threat intelligence analyst gifted with foresight.
Tiresias tells Odysseus that he is the only one with enough cybersecurity knowledge strength to reach Ithaca. But Odysseus is determined to save his crew. He learns that they’ll have to face a very dangerous APT group, the Sirens. They use advanced social engineering (singing) to lure sailors to their doom. So Odysseus orders his men to put in solid protection against voice spam: wax earplugs. The film never lets us hear what the Sirens actually sing. They may well be posing as bank employees, law enforcement, or government officials, but the anti-spam trick keeps the crew safe.
Then far more destructive malware hits the ship: Scylla and Charybdis. From Tiresias’ beginner course in infosec, Odysseus knows that Scylla has six heads, and can hit no more than six users at a time. But dodging her attack means running straight into Charybdis, who will deal critical damage drag the whole ship into a whirlpool. This is the first historical mention of an ethical thought experiment that would later become known as the “trolley problem” — and Odysseus picks Scylla.
Having passed these threats, the remaining crew members land on the island of Thrinacia. That cluster allows initial login with a standard access level for regular users, on one condition: don’t touch the island’s critical resource, the sacred bulls of Helios — chief expert in solar technology. But the warriors ignore Odysseus’ instructions, break the rule, and use that resource to mine food. This triggers a defense system built by OLYMP’s leader, nicknamed Zeus, which permanently blocks strikes down the ship and Odysseus’ crew. Odysseus himself barely survives and reaches Calypso’s island.
Return of root
Once his memory is back, Odysseus builds a raft and charts a course, thanks to Calypso. Athena, the wisest of the OLYMP experts, helps him reach the shores of Ithaca against all odds. He then slips into the city disguised as a beggar.
There, Odysseus passes several steps of multi-factor authentication:
- His old dog Argus sees his master, wags his tail, and dies.
- Telemachus sees this and realizes the poor wanderer is his father.
- His elderly nurse Eurycleia recognizes the man she raised by a unique code the scar on his leg.
But that isn’t enough to restore his root access. So with Telemachus’ help, Odysseus has to enter the palace using the account of one of his former companions, where he meets the administrator, Penelope. Nolan added an important twist here. At this moment, Odysseus regrets creating the first Trojan, which destroyed the infrastructure of an entire city. He also realizes that the malicious suitors’ constant attempts to guess the root password put Ithaca’s infrastructure at risk of the same decline.
Penelope begins to guess who is standing in front of her from his digital footprint indirect signs. She then sets a condition for the would-be root account owners her suitors: she’ll marry the one who can shoot an arrow through the rings of 12 axes with Odysseus’ bow. The bow is essentially a passkey with biometrics, which nobody knew how to fake back in those ancient times. So the bad actors fail one after another. Only Odysseus draws the bowstring and sends an arrow through every axe’s ring. Thanks to the successful biometric authentication, everyone accepts him as the true root king of Ithaca.
The rest is simple: the malware villains are neutralized, the kingdom is saved, and peace and information security return to Ithaca.
Why watching The Odyssey can be dangerous
In the window between the movie stopping being shown in cinemas and its release on digital media, our experts discovered a new multi-stage malicious campaign that had been running since mid-August. Malicious actors are spreading a previously unknown piece of malware called MovieReaper through compromised torrent trackers. They disguise it as downloads of popular movies — first and foremost The Odyssey, one of the biggest premieres of the summer. Scammers use this irresistible bait to make people more likely to download their file. The malware itself is as treacherous as the Sirens. It can hide from detection, give attackers remote access to the victim’s device, and deploy extra modules to stay in the system even after it’s removed. Read the full technical breakdown of MovieReaper on our expert blog, Securelist. Victims of this attack have been found all over the world. This is one more reminder of how important it is to be careful online — especially when downloading files.
Practical lessons from The Odyssey
So what can we learn from the story of the cunning king of Ithaca?
- A good offense isn’t the best defense. Instead of developing software to attack other users, focus on your own information security.
- Keep an eye on your personal data. It can fall into the hands of bad actors, which can lead to targeted attacks.
- Set up multi-factor authentication. It lowers the risk of being hacked, and helps you regain access to your accounts safely.
- Set up reliable protection (and don’t ignore it), because you should beware Greeks bearing gifts!
We love watching movies and breaking them down from a cybersecurity perspective. Read our other top reviews and analyses:
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