IT Brew Movie Club: ‘Independence Day’

Sponsored by

AI agents are starting to do more than access systems. They can invoke tools, execute workflows, and take action across business applications. As that autonomy grows, IT needs visibility into what each agent is allowed to do, what it actually did, who owns it, and how to revoke access when needed. Learn how JumpCloud helps govern AI agents alongside human and device identities.

When alien invaders park their spacecraft above the Earth’s major cities in the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day, humanity’s last hope becomes Jeff Goldblum and his Apple PowerBook 5300.

Satellite engineer David Levinson (played by Goldblum) and wingman Steven Hiller (Will Smith) dock their plane to the alien mothership, and Levinson delivers malicious code that shuts down the extraterrestrials’ defense shields across the globe. Talk about a Project Hail Mary.

After watching this interstellar cyberattack, an IT pro might have some questions.

For one: Don’t these aliens, who are sophisticated enough to coordinate attacks via satellite and build laser-equipped space fighters, have antivirus installed? (This has been a common dunk shared around the internet since the movie’s release.)

Second: Wouldn’t a tech expert like Levinson need to understand the alien spacecraft’s computer system a bit better to make a customized, compatible virus? And with time being of the essence in an alien invasion, did he really need to spring for the skull-and-crossbones animation that pops up when the code executes?

Questions aside, an OS is tough to maintain when you’re light-years away from your home planet, even for an alien race with an enormous spaceship.

“Whatever operating system they were running was likely not updated,” Benny Czarny, CEO and founder of infrastructure cybersecurity company OPSWAT, joked.

Lost in space. While Goldblum’s Mac attack still gets many in the IT crowd laughing today, space-sector cyberattacks do occur.

Three decades later, as companies focus on launching satellites (and even data centers) into orbit, cybersecurity in space is a real concern to Czarny—not science fiction.

Space systems support services and capabilities we rely on on Earth, Czarny said, and attacks could disrupt them, potentially putting lives at risk. Compromised satellites could be hijacked or sabotaged, communications could be disrupted or intercepted, and military or intelligence data could be exposed.

“I believe that there will be way more attacks before there will be more regulations and more standards,” Czarny told us.

From the ground up. Unlike the Independence Day hack, many space-related cyberattacks start on the ground. Take satellite internet, for example.

Viasat revealed in 2022 that an attacker exploited a misconfigured VPN to gain remote access to the trusted management segment of the satellite comms company’s KA-SAT network; this bad actor then used the network access to execute commands—a denial-of-service, ultimately—on a large number of residential modems simultaneously.

A 2025 ransomware attack (likely begun through a phishing email, according to an ETH Zurich report) targeted the South African Weather Service and severed the connection between the IT environment and satellite weather stations.

That same ETH Zurich study discovered 407 cyber operations against the space sector, including distributed denial-of-service and ransomware attacks, in 2025. These incursions, which “remained closely associated with armed conflicts and periods of heightened political tension,” hit at least 183 entities in 46 countries and involved 139 threat actors.

“All identified cyber operations targeted terrestrial space systems, or the IT environment of organisations rather than satellites in orbit,” the report stated.

Why cybersecurity in space is difficult. Deep-space latency can make constant cloud communication and signature updates impractical, and many familiar security tools less effective in space, Czarny told us.

Files coming from ground systems or other spacecraft can carry malware, Czarny said, and the receiving system may be unable to rely on updated online security checks; protection cannot depend on an immediate answer from a cloud service on Earth.

“Antivirus also requires constant cloud communication. You don’t have cloud communication in space,” Czarny said.

Czarny has two ideas to keep a skull and crossbones from appearing on deck. The first is “deterministic” features like a data diode.

With a data diode, one computer sends data (as light!), and the other computer receives it. The optical link information flows in only one direction, so data can leave a protected network but nothing can come back in (like a script saying to disable all shields). With a data diode, the shields computer could operate on a separate, isolated, Goldblum-thwarting connection.

Czarny’s other idea is that every file, software update, AI model, payload package, command package, and removable media device should be treated as untrusted until it is approved. He has high hopes for a technology known as content disarm and reconstruction (CDR), which disassembles a file, removes unproved elements like macros or embedded code, and rebuilds it.

“The assumption is that the files are all malicious, and we are regenerating a new file. It’s like you’re going camping. You’d like to drink the water, so instead of testing the water for bacteria, you are distilling the water,” he said.

Cutting-edge defense technologies aside, the cybersecurity picture is only getting more complex above Earth as orbits become increasingly crowded with infrastructure, including planned “constellations” of data-center satellites.

Compute in space could be its own kind of enemy, hovering over the earth like an alien mothership. “You can coordinate cybersecurity attacks from space if you have that,” Czarny said.

Let’s hope we have better defense shields than those aliens.

For more IT Brew movie club, check out our dives into Hackers, Sneakers, Blackhat, Skyfall, The Matrix, Jurassic Park, WarGames, Blade Runner, The Net, The Terminator, and Memento.