Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld is the mysterious hacker Netflix series I didn’t know I wanted
The trailer for Netflix’s new docuseries Cyberbunker: the criminal underground is almost unbearably tense. It begins in the darkest forests, pierced by the lights mounted on the machine guns of mysterious figures. A flurry of action takes place before the figures are revealed to be armed police and those police slowly make their way through what appears to be a creepy, abandoned bunker. But it soon becomes clear that this bunker is no ordinary bunker. This is…
I won’t spoil it. But I do worry that the trailer will ruin the show for me. Because while the ‘Cyberbunker’ referenced in the title may have been a center of criminal activity, unlike some of the best Netflix documentaries, the criminal activity wasn’t very visual. By framing it as a kind of real world Money theft without the overalls, I worry that the trailer is raising false expectations of something that I suspect won’t be particularly action-packed. It doesn’t have to feel like an action movie to be a story worth telling, and this is certainly a story worth telling.
What is the Cyberbunker?
Netflix’s series is a true story, and you can read a great version of it on The New Yorker’s website. It’s a story about how a small group of hackers led a criminal empire across the Dark Web from an abandoned bunker, and how they were tracked and ultimately captured by Germany’s federal paramilitary police – the scary characters you’ll see in the trailer. As The New Yorker reports, they seized “four hundred and twelve hard drives, four hundred and three servers, sixty-five USB drives, sixty-one laptops and computers, fifty-seven telephones, stacks of paper documents and approximately one hundred thousand. euros in cash. Approximately six hundred and fifty officers were involved in the arrests and raid.”
It’s fascinating stuff, but the trailer makes me worry that I might fall into the trap of trying to pretend that hacking is visually exciting, a tradition perpetuated by countless documentaries and films like Sandra Bullock’s film. The net – which currently has a 44% rating on Rotten Tomatoes – and thousands of horrible stock photos showing hooded hackers opening their laptops with hammers and chisels, using laptops dressed in tailcoats with matching balaclavas, or my current favorite, while holding a keyboard and pointing at it as if it were an AK-47.
I suspect, and I hope, that this show has more in common with The big hack, which is also on Netflix. That’s also a technology-related documentary, and it’s about the dark side of social media and marketing data during the 2016 US presidential election. It’s very good – so good in fact that it was nominated for an Emmy Award, a BAFTA and for the Best Writing Award from the International Documentary Association. There aren’t many weapons in it, but there doesn’t need to be: the story itself is very strong and the documentary gets the message across without trying to make anything out of it. Mission Impossible. I really hope Cyberbunker follows a similar path.
Cyberbunker: the criminal underworld will be available to stream on the world’s top streaming service starting November 8.