Christian Slater Is 'The Wolf' In New Anti-Hacking Campaign From HP

HP has launched a new global campaign to elevate awareness of cyber security risks facing businesses and consumers.

The effort kicks off with a web series called The Wolf that stars actor Christian Slater as a professional hacker. The agencies on the project—produced out of the client’s new HP Studios—are Giant Spoon and gyro.

In the series, Slater portrays a hacker who systematically compromises a company’s digital security system—from mailroom to boardroom. He explains to viewers step by step how he does it through overlooked vulnerabilities and poorly secured printers and PCs.

Episode One opens with a graphic noting that just 2% of the world’s business printers are adequately secured. Slater then appears in a dark and foreboding city street scene intoning, “The sheep never realizes there’s a wolf around until it’s too late.” The sheep, he adds, panic and run into each other. “They fall down and become dinner,” Slater says. “Time to eat.”

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The scene shifts to a large open-area office at what’s said to be large financial firm filled with workers, desks, PCs and printers, as Slater, in the office but unseen by workers, describes how he’s just hacked one of the printers with his smart phone, providing him access to numerous documents.

The scene then cuts to an office birthday party. Soon the birthday girl gets a gift via email—sent by the hacker. She prints it out enabling the bad buy to circumvent firewalls and obtain sensitive data in both printers and PCs.

It turns out the firm is working on a big confidential stock offering for a client and is preparing for an important presentation the next day. By now Villain Slater has all the information he needs to expose the offering before it’s fully baked—the implication being that both companies and many careers will suffer as a result.

Slater asks rhetorically why he hacks and responds “because I can. Who knows maybe next time I’ll come after you.”

Commenting on the campaign, Antonio Lucio, HP Chief Marketing and Communications Officer said, “As the universe of connected devices grows exponentially, so does the sophistication and magnitude of cyber attacks.”

Noting that HP is intently focused on devising better methods of cyber security Lucio added that “The Wolf is a creative way to raise awareness of this growing challenge for companies.”

More episodes of The Wolf, directed by Lance Acord and edited by Oscar winner Kirk Baxter, will follow.

  

 

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