What Can Money Heist Teach Us About Cybersecurity?
As a full-stack developer who has spent many years building secure software systems, I‘m always on the lookout for ways to explain cybersecurity concepts to a broader audience. While watching the hit Netflix series Money Heist recently, I couldn‘t help but notice several striking parallels between the plot and the fundamental principles we strive to apply in the security world.
The show follows a crew of thieves who plan and execute elaborate heists, led by the brilliant and meticulous "Professor." While their actions are highly illegal, the strategies and challenges they face provide some compelling lessons that map quite well to what we see in cybersecurity. Let‘s dive into some of these key insights and how they can inform the way developers approach building secure applications.
Lesson 1: Comprehensive Planning is Non-Negotiable
In Money Heist, the Professor spends months planning every intricate detail of the heists. He maps out every contingency, every potential roadblock, and every required countermove. While the plans don‘t always unfold flawlessly, it‘s that rigorous level of preparation that allows the team to adapt on the fly.
The same principles apply when it comes to designing secure software architectures. Just like a heist, you have to meticulously think through every possible scenario and attack vector upfront. This is where practices like threat modeling and secure architecture reviews are critical.
Threat modeling is a structured process for identifying, prioritizing and mitigating potential security risks early in the development process. By brainstorming attacker motivations, likely attack targets, and required security controls with a diverse group, you uncover gaps and blind spots before they manifest in the code.
Formalizing security touchpoints and gates within your software development lifecycle (SDLC) is also key. This ensures security is evaluated at each phase – from initial requirements gathering through deployment. Retrofitting fundamental security after the fact is costly and prone to failure.
Common secure SDLC components include:
- Security requirements gathering
- Secure architecture/design reviews
- Secure coding guidelines and training
- Static code analysis and code reviews
- Security testing (SAST/DAST)
- Penetration testing before release
- Security checks in CI/CD pipelines
- Ongoing monitoring and incident response
The more proactively and comprehensively you plan for security, the more prepared you‘ll be to handle the curveballs that will inevitably come your way. There‘s no such thing as an invincible system, but having robust defenses mapped out upfront puts you in a much stronger position.
Lesson 2: One Oversight Can Quickly Lead to Compromise
Midway through season 2 of Money Heist, a huge portion of the stolen gold is secretly smuggled out of the Royal Mint via a small underground tunnel. While the gold is eventually recovered, that single point of failure throws the Professor‘s entire plan into chaos as the team scrambles to adjust.
This scenario illustrates how a single security gap or oversight in an application can quickly spiral into a massive breach. Especially for web-facing assets, attackers are relentlessly scanning and probing for any possible opening. And once they find one, the clock starts ticking.
SQL injection is a perfect case in point. It ranks #1 on the OWASP Top 10 list of the most critical security risks to web applications. By inserting malicious SQL statements into application input fields, attackers can often access, modify, or delete sensitive database records.
One study found that a single automated SQL injection tool could harvest over 200,000 unique email addresses from vulnerable sites per day. Another real-world attack compromised over 160,000 databases through a SQL injection point in just 4 months.
The lesson for developers is that you can never let your guard down when it comes to security. Every line of code needs to be evaluated from an attacker‘s perspective. Applying defensive coding best practices is critical, such as:
- Validating and sanitizing all user inputs
- Using parameterized queries vs. concatenating SQL
- Enforcing least privilege for database accounts
- Implementing multi-factor authentication
- Encrypting sensitive data at rest and in transit
Finding and fixing these holes in development is orders of magnitude easier than cleaning up the damage after exploitation. Comprehensive security testing in the SDLC is paramount – you have to assume "the gold" is always at risk.
Lesson 3: Hope Is Not a Viable Security Strategy
The Money Heist crew certainly benefited from their fair share of lucky breaks. From the police walking into traps, to characters surviving gunshot wounds, to Inspector Raquel suddenly switching allegiance – a lot had to go right to pull off their plans.
But as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. The same is true in cybersecurity. Crossing your fingers that attackers won‘t find that vulnerability you didn‘t have time to fix, or that incident you failed to detect, is a recipe for disaster.
Instead, development teams must take a proactive, intentional approach to managing security risks. This means shifting security as far left in the SDLC as possible and making it a continuous, integral part of the development workflow.
Embedding automated security checks and tests into CI/CD pipelines is one powerful way to do this. Every time a developer commits code, you can automatically kick off:
- Static code analysis (SAST)
- Open source/third-party dependency vulnerability scanning
- Dynamic application security testing (DAST)
- Security unit testing and code coverage thresholds
- Container image vulnerability scanning
If any of these checks fail, the build can automatically break and alert the developer to remediate the issue. This fast feedback loop prevents security debt from accumulating and forces issues to be addressed ASAP.
Veracode‘s State of Software Security report found that when security testing is integrated into the pipeline, flaws are fixed 17.5x faster than traditional processes. The report also reveals:
- 76% of applications have at least one vulnerability on initial scan
- 24% of application flaws are high severity
- Flaws take about 6 months to close on average
Clearly, we can‘t just deploy code and hope for the best. Automated security guardrails throughout the pipeline are crucial for maintaining velocity without sacrificing security due diligence. It‘s on developers to define and uphold these standards.
Lesson 4: Resilience is Crucial in the Face of Failure
Throughout the series, the Money Heist characters demonstrate incredible resilience. No matter how dire the circumstances – from team members getting captured or killed to heists going sideways – they always find a way to bounce back and keep pushing forward.
For those of us in the cybersecurity trenches, this hits close to home. System compromises and data breaches are not a matter of "if," but "when." And when they happen, the pressure is immense. The average cost of a data breach in 2022 was $4.35 million, and the average time to identify and contain a breach was 277 days.
Cyber incidents are inevitable, but how you architect your systems to limit the blast radius and how you respond under pressure makes all the difference. Development teams play a critical role in making applications resilient by:
- Implementing robust logging and monitoring to quickly detect anomalies
- Instrumenting code to capture key security events and metrics
- Building redundancy and automated failover capabilities to maintain uptime
- Leveraging infrastructure-as-code to redeploy clean systems
- Automating data backup and recovery processes
- Documenting and drilling incident response playbooks
Having these resilience measures in place, and battle-tested, allows you to absorb the impact of an incident and recover as quickly as possible. It‘s not fun to think about failure scenarios, but preparing for them is the only way to minimize costly downtime and reputational damage.
Most importantly, analyzing root causes after an incident and applying those lessons going forward is how you bounce back stronger. Holding blameless post-mortems is key to focus on improving systems and processes vs. pointing fingers.
Lesson 5: A Cool Head Prevails in a Crisis
One of the Professor‘s defining traits in Money Heist is his ability to stay level-headed and decisive in high-pressure moments. While Inspector Tamayo frequently flies off the handle and makes rash, emotional decisions, the Professor remains unflappable.
For cybersecurity and IT leaders, a calm demeanor in the face of a crisis is equally essential. The way you react when the alarm bells are ringing sets the tone for the entire incident response. Effective leadership requires:
- Clearly assigning roles and responsibilities
- Sticking to the incident response plan
- Making decisions based on facts, not conjecture
- Communicating early and often with stakeholders
- Focusing team efforts on containment and recovery
As a developer, you may not be leading the war room during an incident. But you will be on the front lines troubleshooting and recovering systems. Keeping your wits about you in those moments is crucial.
Document your findings methodically, resist the urge to start applying band-aids, and coordinate closely with the response team. Reacting too quickly without a full picture can often make things worse or destroy evidence.
Gartner finds that organizations with a well-tested IR plan reduce the business impact of a breach by 90% vs. those without one. Having a clear head and a clear plan is what makes the difference between a speedbump and a sinkhole.
The Bottom Line for Developers
Money Heist may be a sensational story of cops and robbers, but the lessons it imparts are highly applicable to the world of cybersecurity. Software developers have an increasingly pivotal role to play in securing the applications that power our digital economy and hold our sensitive data.
We must treat security as a first-class citizen in the SDLC, not an afterthought. This means collaborating closely with security teams, advocating for security requirements, instrumenting code for detective controls, and thinking like an attacker.
One powerful way to level up secure coding skills across your teams is spinning up a Security Champions program. Gartner predicts that over 35% of companies will have such a program by 2025, up from less than 10% today. Empowering developers to lead the charge on security can pay huge dividends.
No application is impenetrable, but with the right planning, the right guardrails, the right mindset, and the right leadership, we can significantly raise the bar. Because at the end of the day, in cybersecurity and in Money Heist, those who fail to plan are planning to fail.
So put on your red jumpsuit and Salvador Dalí mask, and let‘s get to work. Because protecting our users is the most valuable heist of all.