Admittedly, many of my colleagues at Ars—not to mention readers—have far more extensive knowledge of computer security than I do. But even I can recognize a ridiculous hacking scene when I see one.

And boy, Sunday night’s season opener of Homeland contained a doozy. If you’re not a Homeland fan, all you need to know for a basis is that this show is set within a fictional but modern-day CIA. (This particular season is set in Berlin.) Within the first four minutes of Season 5, Episode 1—before any recognizable characters show up on screen—two IT guys working for a Berlin-based porn site somehow manage to penetrate the CIA Berlin Station’s firewall and steal over 1,000 sensitive files. (Art imitating life, anyone?)

Here’s how Homeland depicts an epic CIA hack:

One of the men, unnamed in the scene, brings a USB stick to his co-worker. This guy (we’ll call him Beardy for lack of a better name) seems to be the more skilled of the two. Meanwhile, his partner (“Shaven?”) pops the USB stick into a computer, and we see a video that mocks the Islamic State by inviting potential recruits to a gay sex orgy.

The two men laugh at their work. “So where are we going to post it?” Shaven asks. “Where else?” he says, starting to type into a website called “Online Search.” Here, Shaven finds the website of Al Tayah—an apparent recruiting website for Islamic State.

“I found a way onto it last night,” Beardy says calmly. “Word of advice, retards. If you declare yourselves the cyber-caliphate, change your system password.”

With an angry keystroke, Beardy manages to upload the satirical video to the site. “Our work here is done.”

He and Shaven share a laugh, but suddenly an alert pops up on their computer screen. (Now, the real fun starts.)

The alert reads “server is vulnerable,” pointing out altayah.com only has TLS v1.0. Somehow this warning message tells them that someone else is viewing the Al Tayah website at the same time.

“Who is that?” Shaven asks Beardy.

“I don’t know,” he responds.

---

The scene cuts to CIA Station Berlin. A woman is looking over the shoulder of someone who appears to be a CIA specialist.

“Who is that?” she asks.

On the screen, the duo sees a “Firewall Log” where someone with the username “GabeH.Coud” turns up. The IT guy, named Mills, explains to his boss that this is “douchebag” spelled backwards. (How or why a username turns up in some sort of access log is beyond me, but hey.)

The woman, CIA Berlin Station Chief Allison Carr, gives the order. “Ping him.”

---

Back with Shaven and Beardly. The former gives the same suggestion to Beardy: “Ping him.”

“No way,” Beardy says.

“Ask him who he is!” Shaven pleads.

“We do that and we lose our cover.”

“Dude, they are poking around like we are," Shaven says. "They’re not supposed to be here either.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re our friend,” Beardy replies.

Another alert screen pops up. “He’s pinging us,” Beardy warns Shaven. (Somehow in this world, simply pinging a computer can be dangerous. Ominous music starts playing right now.)

“Wait, no, let me see who it is first,” Beardy continues, pushing Shaven away.

The top of the computer window reads: “Backtrace 318.108.149.373.” (Possibly traceroute to an impossible IP address?) With that, Beardy concludes: “It’s non-attributable.”

“So?”

“So it’s probably government," he tells Shaven. "We don’t want to be showing them anything.”

--

Cut back to CIA Berlin. Mills explains to Carr that “Douchebag” (aka Beardy) is just “hanging outside the firewall.”

Suddenly, a beeping alert goes off on Mills’ computer. “Hold on a second," he says. "He’s trying to get in.”

--

Another cut. “There’s a zero-day defect on this firewall," Beardly says. "We can get in through brute force. We just need computer power.”

With just a couple keystrokes, the hacker somehow manages to turn several video servers for this porn website into a powerful, massive password-cracking machine. It’s almost like a Star Trek-style “re-routing power from life support,” except this happens even faster. (Just ignore the fact that if there was some sort of zero-day in the firewall, a brute force password attack wouldn’t be necessary.)

Shaven weakly protests, but Beardy suddenly starts downloading files. As seen on Mills' computer back at CIA, conveniently nearly all of the organization's document have the word “CIA” in the file type. “Shut it down! Shut it down!” Mills yells hopelessly yells to the room.