Top 10 best hacks

Geeking out and complaining about inaccuracies is fun. But it is like junk food. Too much is bad for your health. We've done the Top 10 worst portrayals of hacking in movies/TV as well as a Part 2 due to high demand. Now it is time for the good stuff. Take it in and feel those healthy positive portrayals revitalizing your brain.

Here are the Top 10 best portrayals of hacking, based off your comments and feedback. Be sure to let us know what we missed, because there are probably some good ones that got left out.

10 Real Genius -- Ice coin trick.

Dry ice in the shape of a coin. Seems feasible with the vending machines shown. It is smart and funny. However, I haven't ever actually seen real proof that this works, so maybe I'm mistaken in including it.

09 NMAP in movies.
Dear movie making people. It takes 5 seconds to as the nearest IT guy "name some tools people use for security". Then take a few screenshots of those tools. Not only did you save money on graphic designers, your movie suddenly just gained some added credibility.

08 Social Network.
Everything looks fairly legit, if possibly in Fast Forward.

07 Bourne Ultimatum
Someone did some homework! We see postfix, SSH, NMAP a BASH shell. I believe there's a scene where he changes the MAC address of a router too, but I can't find it.

06 Real Genius -- [Laslo] games the game
Often dismissed as an overly hokey ending, [Laslo] arrives at the end of the movie with a trailer full of winnings from a sweepstakes. It is a bit hokey, but it is also based off of true events at CalTech. Some students at CalTech in 1975 noticed there was the following line in a sweepstakes being held by McDonald's "Enter as often as you wish.". And that they did, 1.2 MILLION times. Ultimately winning $10,000 worth of prizes including a car.

05 Wargames -- paperclip payphone
Yeah, remember payphones? Well many of you probably remember actually doing this exact thing. Causing a bridge between the speaker housing and the coins lot would result in a free phone call.

04 Flight of the Phoenix
The movie release was pretty cheezy. However, the core story is true. A plane crashed, and from the rubble a new plane arose.

03 Sneakers.

great examples of social engineering. Nothing is more effective than pizza and balloons.

02 Wargames
War-dialing exists.Though it existed well before the movie, the name was quickly adopted.

01 Macgyver
Yep, he's silly, but some of his stuff works. The name has become synonymous with cobbled-together-stuff though, so he wins this round.