Billion Dollar Heist

If you thought that nuclear war, climate change or AI represented the biggest threats to the world - think again. That's the message of this gripping documentary that tells the story of the most daring and audacious bank heist in history - perpetrated not by a bunch of masked figures with automatic weapons and getaway vans, but by a small group of sophisticated hackers and other hired fixers, and started by a simple malware attachment in an email. They got clean away with less than 1/10th of the billion intended. But that's still a vast amount of money for a single job, and more than enough to fund future and increasingly sophisticated crimes.

And if that's what a small group of criminal hackers can do, think what a nation state can achieve if it wants to bring down the entire financial, transportation, communication, energy, industrial, commercial and other essential utility infrastructures of its enemies - essentially to make them grind completely to a halt, putting millions or billions of people at risk. Then look at the world as it is now, with the increasing east-west polarisations of the major powers in the new Cold War. Every reason to be very afraid indeed.

Essential viewing.

A well documented reenactment of a cyber heist. The story was focused on the subject and wasn't dragging it for too long. Great set of interviews that manages to push emphasize the message of this documentary. Great work with the visuals and animation that's giving the sufficient amount of life to this story. Great use of sound effects and audio to turn up the intensity of the events as they unfold. Admirable ideas are being presented about how we combat this new world threat as a species without driving ourselves into extinction. The views presented in interviews seemed to be adequately moderate leaving the audience enlightened and open minded.

Some of the best 80 minutes spent on TV were spent on this documentary. It is sufficiently detailed and still easy for the layman to understand. As a technology person, I was underwhelmed and would have preferred more details, but I can well understand that the documentary was made for the general public, and hence, it serves its purpose.

Security is the least focused area in any IT system.

REMEMBER, the weakest link in the Security ecosystem is the Humans. And this document clearly demonstrates the series of errors humans committed to bring a country on it knees literally. Iwould love another documentary on the hacker group.

Movie picks up a strong topic, widely accepted yet no near visibility of addressing the problem at hand.

Unfortunately, the movie choose to drag along for long hours when it could have been easily covered in 30-45 mins max. The content gets clouded with with kind of story telling used that emphasises unnecessary use of animations, graphics and fillers, which acts as more of a distraction in the smooth movie / story telling we expect.

It's like an animated movie made for kids and teenagers, probably it is but at the cost of loosing its steam for serious audience that are keen on content !

We deserve better !

Another archetype of Netflix's so-called "documentaries".

Get a bunch of people who were part of the story to tell it for you. Put together a few drawings to illustrate their thoughts. Zero investigation, no journalistic research whatsoever. You'd think they would send a few investigators on the tail of those cyber-crooks? Interview the only person that was found guilty, the lawyers, the bank? Integrate the small world of hackers to get some insights? Think again. It's hypothesis after hypothesis. Fill the blanks with endless random images representing futuristic network connections around the world along with stressful music, you're done.

The result is what we're all too used to by now; something that looks like a high tech commercial predicting the end of the world by computers, buttered with blend statements on cyber-threats that everyone's well aware of, while watching video clips straight for the Netflix free bank of computer related imagery. You almost end up forgetting what the actual topic is initially about.

That's all it takes in Netflix' view to make a good documentary . This masterpiece would be about 15 mins long if it wasn't for all the fillers. Spare yourself from this garbage.