IT Brew Movie Club: ‘Jurassic Park’

If you think you had a bad day at work, at least your IT error didn’t accidentally free a bunch of dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park, the 1993 box-office hit, is known more for velociraptors breaking doors than tech stacks breaking down, but that doesn’t mean IT Brew shouldn’t warn readers about the dino-sized disasters possible when a tech leader ignores security fundamentals.

The theme park’s computer programmer, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), thinks his peers and boss don’t recognize his talents (like a few IT practitioners today, perhaps). In response, he packs dino embryos into a fake Barbasol can and sets out to sell them to a competitor. Aside from his messy desk and messier attempt at corporate espionage, Nedry also commits a herd of technical errors worth noting.

Stanislav Kazanov, head of GRC, cybersecurity, and sustainability at software development company Innowise, reviewed the work of one of cinema’s worst IT pros.

Root access. Nedry controlled the park’s entire infrastructure with zero oversight. His programming scripts opened locked doors, de-electrified electric fences, and, conveniently, eliminated logging of his malicious activity.

Kazanov and his team operate under a “least privilege” methodology: “You only get the keys to the rooms that you actually need to work in.” That’s very different from Jurassic Park’s, well, most privilege. If Nedry writes code, he shouldn’t need access to the velociraptor cage switch, Kazanov told us.

Single knowledge source. “I can’t get Jurassic Park back on line without Dennis Nedry,” a frustrated engineer Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) says as he looks over his colleague’s screen full of incomprehensible commands.

Nedry debugged a system of “over two million lines of code” that only he could run and understand. Instead of one person controlling a giant, largely automated system, Kazanov sees responsible companies today engaging in peer reviews, and tying instructions and comments directly into the code itself and any changes.

No real disaster recovery. Park owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), stuck on what to do after the dinosaurs begin to dinosaur, decides on the classic IT maneuver of turning everything off and back on again. That leads to a flipped circuit breaker—one that paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) needs to reflip after tiptoeing past the raptor pen. Not a great plan, according to Kazanov.

Companies today need cloud replicas of their environments, and must rehearse their ability to spin those up in an emergency, he told us. Kazanov noted that some companies stress-test and break their own systems “during a normal work day, just to make sure that their automated backups work perfectly.”

Fail open vs. Fail closed. Design teams have to decide if they lock or unlock environments in the event of a failure, Kazanov said. If a cyberattack hits a company network, for example, it’s likely important to block traffic entering and leaving the system—at least temporarily. There’s a similar principle at work if an ATM fails. “It doesn’t just open and spit out all of the cash,” Kazanov said.

The park is “fail open,” meaning a shutdown turns fences off by default—not great if you have dinos behind those fences.

Going solo. Nedry didn’t lack skills. He built an infrastructure that could run the whole park with a minimum staff. In fact, that was part of the problem: too much power for one IT pro. Perhaps there’s also a lesson in this for his boss, who calls him a “butterfingers,” and colleagues who keep a running total of the park’s many technical glitches. “I am totally unappreciated in my time,” Nedry says from his desk.

One IT person shouldn’t have to—or even be able to—do everything.

For more IT Brew movie club, check out our dives into Hackers, Sneakers, Blackhat, Skyfall, and The Matrix.