Cybercrime, on top of being difficult to detect and even more so to prove, is notoriously tricky to visualize. The impact may be tangible, even devastating – nuclear plants damaged, hospitals disabled, pipelines shut down – but the perpetrators are shadowy and inscrutable, the crime unseen and insidious, the methods vague and indecipherable to lay people without a knack for computer science.
Billion Dollar Heist, a new feature-length documentary, attempts the formidable challenge of turning one of the biggest financial crimes in history – the February 2016 cyber heist of $81m from the US Federal Reserve accounts for the central bank of Bangladesh – into informative entertainment. Director Daniel Gordon employs a range of cinematic techniques – some illuminative, some overly cliched – to get at a highly sophisticated cyber crime involving several countries, time zones and financial institutions. Among them: animation, dramatic recreation, stock footage of beeping ones and zeros, archival footage on the relatively brief history of hacking, ominous narration from British broadcaster and cybersecurity journalist Misha Glenny.
