In The Realm of the Hackers is an Australian documentary directed by Kevin Anderson about the prominent hacker community, centered in Melbourne, Australia in the late 80′s to early 1990.The storyline is centered around the Australian teenagers going by the hacker names Electron and Phoenix, who were members of an elite computer hacking group called The Realm and hacked into some of the most secure computer networks in the world, including those of the US Naval Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government lab charged with the security of the US nuclear stockpile, and NASA.
So fast and widespread was the attack, no-one could work out how it had happened – until one of the hackers called The New York Times to brag.
Ten years after their arrest, this dramatized documentary uncovers not only how they did it but why. It takes us headlong into the clandestine, risky but intoxicating world of the computer underground.