Cybersecurity Lessons from Red One: a holiday film with serious security flaws
Today, I watched Red One, the new holiday action-comedy starring Dwayne Johnson (Callum Drift) and Chris Evans (Jack). Fun movie? Sure. But the cybersecurity at the North Pole? YIKES. My nascent inner cybersecurity enthusiast was in more pain than the cheeks of a contestant in Krampus's slapnacht game. Professional deformation, if you will! Santa’s North Pole CISO desperately needs an overhaul. Let’s dive in — with some spoilers, of course.
1. Identity and Access Management Failures
- Tailgating: One of the most blatant breaches occurs when Jack simply tailgates Callum through a portal in a toy store — twice — bypassing the authentication process.
- Guest or temporary badge mismanagement: If Jack was temporarily assigned to a project, he should have been provisioned with a temporary or guest ID and badge, which should have been deactivated immediately upon completion of the mission. But who cares about cybersecurity hygiene when Santa’s gone?!
- Lack of biometrics: Employees accessed elevators and restricted areas without badges or identity verification. Come on, you're securing Christmas, not Ross's sandwich. With security this lax, it’s no wonder Santa was kidnapped so easily!
- Dubious VPN practices: Jack traces the connection’s origin (Aruba) of the customer who later kidnapped Santa, even though he’d previously said VPNs made tracing connections nearly impossible. But then, bam! He finds it in the blink of an eye. Hold on — isn’t a VPN supposed to obscure the user's real IP address? Well, it might not be impossible, but definitely not that easy. Otherwise, we are all in trouble, lads! And let’s not even get started on how easily he found Santa’s location in the first place. His CISO team leaves much to be desired.
- Insecure badge design: The badge Jack finds earlier to enter the premises includes a photo, name, and company's name — a solid security faux pas. If stolen with malicious intent, this would do little to protect the user. Ideally, badges should be plain and devoid of information that might reveal details about the premises they grant access to.
2. Lack of Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems
How does someone waltz into the North Pole and Santa's office undetected? No alarms, sensors, or cameras flagging unusual activity — no detection, prevention, or deterrence mechanisms. Callum only accidentally notices some suspicious light activity at his office. Even if an attacker bypasses initial security, where is the defense-in-depth strategy to stop them further inside? It’s no surprise Santa was abducted.
Similarly, Krampus’ premises displayed the same vulnerabilities. The intruders entered freely and were only detected after Jack stole precious data (gold).
3. Social Engineering at Its Worst
Those innocent-looking snowglobe gifts? Classic Trojan horse tactics! Much like phishing emails that urge you to click malicious links, these gifts delivered ransomware that trapped recipients inside the snowglobe. Instead of encrypting your files, it encrypts you. A perfect reminder: never open unexpected emails or unsolicited links!
4. No Proper Incident Response Plan
After Santa’s kidnapping, chaos ensued. While finding him was a priority (Red One-P1), there was no evident incident response plan. Critical steps like containment were neglected, allowing further compromise of the North Pole’s operations. Callum only realized the full scope of the breach after recognizing deepfake content and discovering that the entire North Pole had been compromised.
5. No Backups
Unbelievable: there was no backup plan for Santa's role. Cybersecurity best practices dictate the "3-2-1 backup rule," invented by photographer Peter Krogh: three copies of critical data (or, in this case, Santa!), stored across two different mediums, with one kept off-site. Look, I get it — Santa’s the big man, the ultimate superuser with admin privileges. But seriously? No one to save X-mas?
6. No Regression Testing or Validation
After saving Santa and removing the malware Gryla, the team skipped a crucial step: regression testing. They pushed systems back into production without validating whether other components of the system were compromised. Guys, you’ve just experienced a major event — much like the CrowdStrike-related IT outage we had back in July. Oh, guess what? They skipped the proper validation too.
7. Post-Incident Analysis and Lessons Learned
Where was the post-incident analysis? No root cause investigation, no implementation of preventative measures, and no documentation of the actions taken or lessons learned. Basically, they’re doomed to repeat this mess next Christmas.
All jokes aside... oh, wait a minute, I didn’t agree to that. Sorry, I couldn’t resist throwing in a Chandler Bing line. I can't help it, it's a compulsion. Well, while Red One may just be a holiday movie, it’s a humorous yet poignant reminder of why cybersecurity hygiene is of high importance. The North Pole is a textbook example of what NOT to do. Hopefully, they’ll take these lessons into account for Red Two.