I saw 'The Hunter' over the weekend (with Willem Dafoe and highly recommended) and saw a shortcut to AVG on his laptop computer. What tv shows or movies etc have you seen which display computer security software (or hardware for that matter?)
Almost all movies which have hackers feature some kind of magical DOS where you can hack everywhere and anywhere with matrix style text flying around.
There is nothing magical about it. Like everything, that has happened in "Live Free or Die Hard", happened in a real life multiple times, just not all at once.
Early episodes of Big Bang Theory used to have a Norton / Symantec security box in their bookshelf. I think it was Norton 360 actually.
... And I kind of remember a movie with Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher where she worked for Symantec too.
I am not saying people don't hack things. I'm saying it doesn't happen magically with few key presses. (i.e. ping address, yes I breached the firewall now we have 5 seconds before they spot us)
I have just watched Blackhat, it is pretty underrated, because most people do not get it, obviously most people are not involved in computers.
There are hundreds of linux distros, you can even create one yourself to do exactly, what you want. Hacking has never been easier.
Just watched 'The Net' again (the 1995 version and one of my favourites) and didnt see any vendors in it - the story is good though. A security program called 'Gatekeeper' is sold which has a backdoor in and enables access to host systems by a hacking group called 'Praetorians'.