Magnitus: ok, I didn't expect a realistic hacking game to be successful, but there is grossly oversimplifying certain aspects and then there is this.

You can't freely bounce IP packets off arbitrary computers without compromising them and setting them up for it first.

The game is still pretty entertaining (though I would have preferred if they had made the game geekier by making you find vulnerabilities in the system even if it's kiddy stuff), but this part is just wrong.

Jonesy89: ..when I first got the game, that didn't stop me from taking my computer down to a local coffee shop with wifi access and booting up the game to troll passers-by by making it look like I was hacking into government databases.

barthazar: The game's backstory actually accounts for that, in that what you see is not Internet as we know it today. Internet itself is long gone since in the future-world of large corporations it was no longer commercially viable and with multitude of security issues, malware epidemic, widespread hacking it was finally taken down. The network you see in the game is a global corporate-only network, where any user is supposed to be well verified and authenticated before accessing the network. It is used for inter-corporation communication only while hacking and security issues are relatively new to the infrastructure. That's why it's so easy to access some of the systems.

Belsirk: And they opted by using servers running Win 9.x, touche...