{"id":700063,"date":"2025-11-20T04:00:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T01:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-the-classic-anime-ghost-in-the-shell-predicted-the-future-of-cybersecurity-30-years-ago\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T04:00:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T01:00:21","slug":"how-the-classic-anime-ghost-in-the-shell-predicted-the-future-of-cybersecurity-30-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-the-classic-anime-ghost-in-the-shell-predicted-the-future-of-cybersecurity-30-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"How the classic anime ‘Ghost in the Shell’ predicted the future of cybersecurity 30 years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The year is 2030. An \u201cinfamous mystery hacker\u201d known as the Puppet Master<\/a> is wreaking havoc on the internet, breaking into the so-called cyber-brains of several humans as well as<\/a> \u201cevery terminal on the network.\u201d As it turns out, the Puppet Master is a creation of Japan\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In other words, the Puppet Master is what we would call today a government-backed hacker, or advanced persistent threat (APT). In this case, however, the \u201cphantom\u201d hacker goes rogue and is wanted for \u201cstock manipulation, spying, political engineering, terrorism, and violation of cyber-brain privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is the basic premise of the Japanese anime<\/a> cult classic \u201cGhost in the Shell<\/a>,\u201d which marked its 30th anniversary this week since its debut, and was based on the chapters titled \u201cBye Bye Clay\u201d and \u201cGhost Coast\u201d from the first volume of the eponymous manga, released<\/a> in May 1989.<\/p>\n

To say that the story of the Puppet Master was ahead of its time may be an understatement. The World Wide Web, essentially what flourished from the internet as we know it today, was invented in 1989, the same year that the first volume of \u201cGhost in the Shell\u2019s\u201d manga \u2014 including the story of the Puppet Master \u2014 hit news<\/a>stands in Japan. (The World Wide Web publicly launched in 1991.)<\/p>\n

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A scene from Ghost in the Shell\u2019s manga, depicting an official from Public Security Section 6 and the Puppet Master<\/span>Image Credits:<\/strong>Screenshot TechCrunch<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the manga, when the Puppet Master gets caught, an official from Public Security Section 6, an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explains that they had been after the hacker \u201cfor a long time,\u201d and they \u201cprofiled his behavioral tendencies and code\/tech patterns.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result, we were finally able to create a special anti-puppeteer attack barrier,\u201d the official says in the manga.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the risk of extrapolating too much from a couple of sentences, the reality is that what the official is describing is basically what cybersecurity companies, such as antivirus firms, do everyday to stop malware. Not only do they create so-called signatures<\/a> based on the malware\u2019s code, but also based on its behavior and properties, known as heuristics<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are other elements of the plot that turned out to be prescient.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the Puppet Master investigation, Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist and commander of the counter-cyberterrorism unit Section 9, hacks into the network of the Sanitation Department to track a garbage truck. (These days, government hackers who work for intelligence agencies often break into large networks to spy on specific individual targets, rather than to siphon data out of the hacked network itself.)<\/p>\n

While that happ<\/a>ens, one of the garbage men confesses to his colleague that he hacked into his wife\u2019s cyber brain because he thinks that she is cheating on him. Right after, we find out he\u2019s been using a computer virus he got from \u201csome programmer.\u201d This is a clear case of tech-enabled domestic abuse, or even stalkerware, which TechCrunch\u00a0has investigated extensively over the last few years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As it turns out, the abusive garbage man had no wife. His memories were all made up. His ghost<\/a> \u2014 essentially his mind or consciousness \u2014 was hacked by the Puppet Master with the goal of using him to hack into government officials. In some way, that\u2019s similar to what some advanced hackers do when they hack into networks that they then use to hack their actual target, as a way to hide their tracks adding separation from themselves and the final target.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Puppet Master as a government hacker, the breaching of networks to track targets or use them to then attack other networks, and a jealousy-fueled hack are not the only fascinating bits of speculative fiction related to hacking in the anime.\u00a0<\/p>\n

John Wilander, a cybersecurity veteran who writes hacker-themed fiction books, wrote an exhaustive analysis of the movie<\/a> that highlighted details referencing real-life scenarios. Wilander gave examples, like hackers reusing known exploits or malware to make attribution more difficult, investigating malware without alerting the authors and infecting yourself with it, and using computers for industrial espionage.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the manga and anime take the basic \u2014 and realistic \u2014 premise of the Puppet Master as a hacker into more fantastical directions. The hacker, which turns out to be an advanced artificial intelligence, can control humans through their cyber-brains, and is self-aware to the point that \u2014 spoiler alert \u2014 it asks for political asylum and ends up proposing to Kusanagi to fuse their \u201cghosts<\/a>,\u201d essentially their minds.<\/p>\n

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A screenshot of \u201cGhost in the Shell,\u201d in particular the scene where the Puppet Master and Major Kusanagi fuse<\/span>Image Credits:<\/strong>Screenshot\/YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To understand how prophetic \u201cGhost in the Shell\u201d was, it\u2019s crucial to put it in its historical context. In 1989 and 1995, cybersecurity wasn\u2019t even a word yet, although the term \u201ccyberspace<\/a>\u201d had been famously coined by sci-fi author William Gibson in his classic book, \u201cNeuromancer.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Computer security, or information security, however, was already a reality, and had been for a couple of decades, but it was an extremely niche specialty within computer science<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first computer virus is believed to be the Creeper<\/a> worm, which was unleashed in 1971 on the Arpanet, the government-developed network that became the internet\u2019s forerunner. A handful of other viruses and worms wreaked havoc after that, before they became ubiquitous once the internet and the World Wide Web became a reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps the very first documented government espionage campaign on the internet was the one discovered by Clifford Stoll<\/a>, an astronomer by training who also managed the computers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. In 1986, Stoll noticed a 75 cent accounting error in the network, which eventually led him to discover that a hacker had broken into the lab\u2019s systems. In the end, the hacker was identified and found to have been feeding information from the lab and other U.S. government networks to the Soviet Union\u2019s KGB.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stoll immortalized his months-long scrupulous and painstaking investigation in the book \u201cThe Cuckoo\u2019s Egg<\/a>,\u201d a first person account that reads like a very detailed and extensive report by security researchers analyzing a hacking campaign carried out by government hackers. \u201cThe Cuckoo\u2019s Egg\u201d has since become a classic, but it\u2019s probably fair to say it didn\u2019t exactly hit the mainstream when it was released.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, \u201cGhost in the Shell\u201d creator Masamune Shirow never spoke about what real-life events inspired the hacking plot points in the manga. But it\u2019s clear that he was paying attention to what, at the time, was a hidden world that was alien to most people on Earth, who were still years away from being online, let alone being aware of the existence of hackers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our Technology<\/a><\/span> category.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The year is 2030. An \u201cinfamous mystery hacker\u201d known as the Puppet Master is wreaking havoc on the internet, breaking into the so-called cyber-brains of several humans as well as \u201cevery terminal on the network.\u201d As it turns out, the Puppet Master is a creation of Japan\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.\u00a0\u00a0 In other words, the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":700064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/ghost-in-the-shell-anime.png?resize=1200,649","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[2970,70375,42438,70944,70513,42187,151443,1499,88321,72287],"class_list":["post-700063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-anime","tag-cybersecurity","tag-ghost-in-the-shell","tag-hackers","tag-hacking","tag-manga","tag-media-entertainment","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}