CSI Cyber review: the latest CSI franchise debuted last Wednesday and its focus is on the cybercrime.
Unlike the previous CSI shows which are set in police department CSI sections, this spinoff is set in the FBI’s cyber crime division. The team is headed by Avery Ryan, played by Patricia Arquette (best known from the tv show Medium), and supported by a trio of white hat hackers, a regular FBI agent and a black hat hacker Avery is trying to reform.
While she heads the team, Patricia Arquette’s character Avery is not a white hat hacker. She is a behavioral analyst. There are several scenes where she is focusing carefully on the characters and while I kept expecting her to have a vision like in Medium, no, she is just analyzing their behaviour to move the plot along.
The first show started with a baby kidnapping. Criminals first hack into the nanny cam to case the joint and then steal the baby to sell on the dark net. As the show progresses, the team finds out that other babies have been kidnapped via a flaw in the nanny cam software. Spoiler alert: they catch the bad guys.
How accurate is the portrayal of cybercrime? I liked that the first plot showed how regular folks get hacked. I also like how they showed that a flaw in software (which the company was too cheap to fix) was the conduit for hackers. That all happens in the real world of cybercrime. I thought the baby kidnapping part was a bit extreme, most hackers are more concerned with getting credit card numbers and email addresses.
But not bad for a first outing. Unlike the first episode of Scorpion which left me frothing at the mouth in the first fifteen minutes at the outrageous inaccuracies. On Wednesday nights at 10pm on CBS and CTV.
