IT Brew Movie Club: ‘Sneakers’ (1992)

It’s pen-testing, ’90s-style—and it’s more exciting than you might think.

The techno-thriller film Sneakers (1992) follows a crew of experts who are paid by companies to test their physical security and cyber defenses—something familiar to pretty much everyone today, even if the concepts might have seemed alien to the audience at the time.

The team (which includes Robert Redford, Ben Kingsley, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, David Strathairn, and Mary McDonnell) is pressured by federal agents (or perhaps fake federal agents?) into stealing a device common to any action movie: a mysterious black box. And this box, it turns out, breaks the encryption protecting the power grid, federal reserve, and seemingly every other piece of important infrastructure in the US.

In this installment of IT Brew Movie Club, we talk to Trevor Hilligoss, chief intelligence officer at cybersecurity company SpyCloud and former federal agent and FBI task force officer, about scenes in Sneakers that still hold up more than 30 years later.

The quest for a decryptor.

• Plot point. Martin Bishop (Redford), his former hacking friend Cosmo (Kingsley), and various government agencies want a decryptor discovered by mathematician Dr. Gunter Janek (Donal Logue). “It’s the code breaker. No more secrets,” Bishop says.
• Why it’s still relevant. Companies today are in an intense race to ensure their most important information is protected by the latest encryption standards, including those that can withstand theoretical (for now) quantum-computing decryption efforts.
• While Hilligoss thinks we’ll need technology far beyond Janek’s “Raspberry Pi daughterboard sat inside of an old two-track” player to crack universal encryption, he sees Sneakers as catching on early to a threat we’ll likely face sooner rather than later. “There will probably be similar conversations to what they had in the movie,” he said. “If you could break any encryption anywhere, that’s a risk to everything.”

Social engineering.

• Plot point. In one scene, Bishop—balloons in hand—pretends he desperately needs a front-desk clerk to buzz him through an office entrance. He acts like he’s delivering a cake for a surprise party—right as co-conspirator Carl (Phoenix), dressed as a delivery guy, insists to the same clerk that he needs a signature. “Push the goddamn buzzer, will ya?” Bishop hollers, while Carl complains, “I could lose my job.” )
• Why it’s relevant. That tactic demonstrates a pair of social-engineering tactics that still work today. First, urgency. Phishers still find creative “action required” ways to compel a target to move quickly. Ransomware actors intentionally give victims substantially less time than required to make decisions, to prevent targets from going to the police, Hilligoss said.
• According to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, around 60% of breaches “involved a human element” (defined by behavior like credential abuse, social action, errors, and malware interaction).
• Humans are still the weakest link today, according to Hilligoss: “We’ve created these super-secure means of authentication and security, but the end of the rope is still being held by a human being.”

Hackers get there first. Government finishes second.

• Plot point. In Sneakers, the federal agents seem to always be a few steps behind Bishop’s crew.
• Why it’s relevant. Unfortunately, that’s often the case, according to Hilligoss, who spent almost three years on the FBI Cyber Task Force.“I’m not standing on the street corner trying to predict what crime is happening. I can only respond to what has already occurred, and that’s kind of a tough pill to swallow” for an aspiring, idealistic agent, Hilligoss said of that time. “Typically, we’re responding to something that’s already happened, and the prevention for us is reducing harm.”

What’s changed since 1992.

• Hilligoss sees a lot more public–private cooperation now, unlike the antagonism shown in the movie between our heroes and the federal government. (At the FBI, Hilligoss relied on experts like non-government crypto pros to follow the money in an info-stealing case, he said. The recent global cooperation behind the malware-disruption effort Operation Endgame is another example of this kind of cooperation.)
• Hilligoss believes today’s cloud-based, internet-connected systems and devices would lead to a much less interesting version of the movie in 2026. For present-day pen testers, he said, “It’s much more advantageous to sit in a house or office building somewhere and attack a network from afar,” rather than trying to be in the right physical places at the right time to beat hardware controls.

So, what would Sneakers (2026) look like—just a bunch of people typing? Hilligoss sees a present-day version of the movie as a bit more of a snooze.

“There’s a box. We got to get a box,” he said. “But I think a lot of the steps leading up to that point would be a lot less interesting.”

For more IT Brew movie club, check out our dive into Hackers.