Want to see what a real hacker looks like? GIF shows the true faces of cybercrime
The idea behind the movie "Blackhat," released in January, is not unheard of in the real world of hacking. It tells the story of a hacker turned informant who helps the government root out the perpetrators of cyberattacks in exchange for an ease on jail time for his own crimes.
We've seen this before. Take the case of Hector Monsegur, aka Sabu, who turned on the hacking group Anonymous, acting as a mole for the FBI.
What we haven't seen before, however, is a hacker that looks like actor Chris Hemsworth, People magazine's 2014 Sexiest Man Alive.
That's not to say that hackers can't be beautiful, of course. But as a group, hackers tend to be faceless, nameless, indeed, anonymous.
The folks at Secure Thoughts, a website dedicated to cybersecurity and Internet privacy, wondered, what does the average hacker look like? So they took photos of 50 of the most notorious hackers (whose photos were available) and compiled them into a composite of what a hacker really looks like.
This GIF combines the faces of such hackers as Barrett Brown, a mouthpiece for Anonymous who was recently sentenced to more than five years in prison for stealing data from intelligence firm Stratfor, and Gary McKinnon, who, in 2002, was accused of the biggest military hack of all time.
Also included: Robert Tappan Morris, credited with creating the first computer worm, and, yes, Sabu.
Secure Thoughts also put together the average face of the female hacker: