Culture

Monitoring the Dark Army with Kibana on Mr. Robot

By
Renuka Hermon

Elliot uses Kibana to visualize the Dark Army’s efforts to steal data in "eps3.4_runtime-error.r00." Elastic users across the globe do a double take. We try to calmly write a blog post.

Mr. Robot is a company-wide favorite for reasons that are likely obvious. The show is well-known for depicting cybersecurity scenarios with realistic detection strategy, tools, and response. So when the Mr. Robot team reached out to us, we were thrilled to hear that they wanted to feature Kibana in an upcoming episode. We, of course, said “yes!” We couldn’t wait to see our software in action in Elliot's world. By the way, you’ll notice that it’s not the latest version of Kibana, but Kibana 4 to fit with the show's timeline.

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In true form, the technical minds at Mr. Robot wanted to build an authentic Kibana dashboard populated with data, created using the real tools. Can you see why we are fans?

Ryan Kazanciyan, Technical Consultant for Mr. Robot, indulges us all in the cybersecurity background behind each episode. In his latest post, he dives into how he made a Kibana dashboard that depicts malicious activity performed by the Dark Army. To start, Ryan built an ELK (today referred to as the Elastic Stack) VM comprised of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Then he populated it with data from Windows and Linux systems. For more behind-the-scenes commentary about how he built each section of the dashboard, head over to his blog post.

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We love hearing about all the ways users put the Elastic Stack to work. Seeing Elliot use Kibana to visualize the Dark Army’s attacks, well, it was pretty surreal.

Here’s a taste of reactions from fans on our team:

“Mr. Robot's writers and consultants have created a refreshing, technically honest show. They don't skimp on the detail, but it's all approachable. It rings familiar. I am humbled they chose to use the Elastic Stack.” - Nick Waringa, Senior Security Analyst
“Our whole family set a Mr. Robot weekend-binge-watch record in preparation for the Kibana episode.” - Beth McAnerney, Netsuite Administrator
“The last time I was this excited to be a nerd was when I read Snow Crash!” - Mark Walkom, Solutions Architect / Developer Advocate
“Finally I work somewhere cool enough to make it on Mr. Robot!” - Grant Murphy, Cloud Engineer