[Shadowrun] The "stay @ home" hacker discussion

[codeGlaze]

Could we not cruft up OgreBattle's TGD Design Notes thread?
FBMF, could you maybe split that discussion? Or you guys could just use this.

Is there a discussion about why it's important for hackers/deckers to be physically present and near their targets? I remember Frank taking it as a given once.

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Is there a discussion about why it's important for hackers/deckers to be physically present and near their targets? I remember Frank taking it as a given once.

It's been thrown around a few times. Basically, characters who aren't adventuring simultaneously and coterminously with the other characters aren't really "in" the party. It's OK to split the party during downtime now and again, but if the party is split up during actions that take a long time to resolve or are major climaxes of the adventure, actual players are going to wander off and play Smash Brothers while the characters who aren't theirs deal with their issues.

The stay at home hacker is corrosive to cooperative storytelling, because he does his thing while the other players twiddle their thumbs, and then he twiddles his thumbs while the other players do things. People literally leave the table.

-Username17

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Is there a discussion about why it's important for hackers/deckers to be physically present and near their targets? I remember Frank taking it as a given once.

It's been thrown around a few times. Basically, characters who aren't adventuring simultaneously and coterminously with the other characters aren't really "in" the party. It's OK to split the party during downtime now and again, but if the party is split up during actions that take a long time to resolve or are major climaxes of the adventure, actual players are going to wander off and play Smash Brothers while the characters who aren't theirs deal with their issues.

The stay at home hacker is corrosive to cooperative storytelling, because he does his thing while the other players twiddle their thumbs, and then he twiddles his thumbs while the other players do things. People literally leave the table.

-Username17

Truth.

I've never had the "hacker sits at home in the basement and never leaves" PC last. And once a player leaves a group it tends to destabilize things pretty severely. The player *always* thinks it's going to be awesome and lots of fun and safe for the character but they just sit there and basically get to do MST3K style commentary and occasionally roll when a computer needs hacking. Assuming that you *can* reach the computer that you need to hack.

It's a kludge against reality to say "no motherfucker you have to be there", but then again, real hacking isn't anything like SR hacking anyway, so why be a slave to reality?

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It's a kludge against reality to say "no motherfucker you have to be there", but then again, real hacking isn't anything like SR hacking anyway, so why be a slave to reality?

I'm not an expert, but, "sneak in, get passwords, get physical access to the computers, and hack them there," seems like an eminently plausible story.

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Is there a discussion about why it's important for hackers/deckers to be physically present and near their targets? I remember Frank taking it as a given once.

It's been thrown around a few times. Basically, characters who aren't adventuring simultaneously and coterminously with the other characters aren't really "in" the party. It's OK to split the party during downtime now and again, but if the party is split up during actions that take a long time to resolve or are major climaxes of the adventure, actual players are going to wander off and play Smash Brothers while the characters who aren't theirs deal with their issues.

The stay at home hacker is corrosive to cooperative storytelling, because he does his thing while the other players twiddle their thumbs, and then he twiddles his thumbs while the other players do things. People literally leave the table.

-Username17

I've seen that kind of hacker work exactly once, and in there she was playing an oracle type of handicapped uber hacker and info nerd. I was gm'ing and it was a shorter campaign, so I designed the main conflict (Troll uber sammie gang, with Otaku behind the scenes stirring chaos) around a path where she could work with. That and I kinda stretched out matrix combat to fit the normal encounters, so she was serving as a debuffer while fending off Otaku attacks, made for a great "uber troll sammie" bossfight. An orc sammie (played by BF at the time) had a video camera mounted on his shoulder, which served as the hacker/info broker's eyes and ears. It was a lot of fun and everyone was able to have a great time, including some great character work between the two, but it required a lot of work designing stuff on my part to make it work.

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Basically, characters who aren't adventuring simultaneously and coterminously with the other characters aren't really "in" the party.

That doesn't exclude a hacker who sits in his basement, hacking blast doors open and closed for the other characters while they're in a firefight, now does it?

sneak in, get passwords, plug a wireless card into the computers, and hack them remotely while the commandos hold off security

FTFY

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I think you could go somewhere with an Oracle character who serves as a party buffer while never being remotely close to the action. I have no idea how well that would mesh with actual Shadowrun mechanics, but it seems fine conceptually.

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The stay at home hacker is corrosive to cooperative storytelling, because he does his thing while the other players twiddle their thumbs, and then he twiddles his thumbs while the other players do things. People literally leave the table.

The main problem with the hacker in Shadowrun wasn't that he didn't have to travel with the group. If the game was set up right, you can definitely represent a hacker as being some dude in a van providing support to the main group who accomplishes the mission.

But Shadowrun really didn't do that, Shadowrun did something far worse. They gave the hacker his own game. When you're traversing the matrix, you're basically doing your own side dungeon. And that's why everyone walks away. Whether your hacker's PC is physically with the group or not, the moment the hacker decides to do something, it means everyone else in the group can't do anything.

To make matters worse, if your adventure is a data retrieval, then it literally hinges on the hacker succeeding. You get him to some computer terminal and he jacks in, and then it's totally up to him. If he botches the job, well there goes the mission. You more or less hope as a GM that you can arrange some kind of firefight for the group in the outside world simply to keep them occupied while the hacker traverses the Matrix security.

The main problem with Shadowrun hacking is it needs to happen a lot faster. Hacking someone's cyberarm needs to be mechanically closer to casting a wizard debuff spell where it resolves in a few dice rolls. Hacking in general is way too complicated, in every edition of Shadowrun. I don't know of any group that doesn't ban deckers/hackers, regardless of edition. Usually the decking part is done by some NPC you have to escort or you're given missions that don't require hacking.

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Evolution in thinking! Really, pretty much anyone who has said anything on the Gaming Den more than a year ago believes a slightly different version of ideals and realities in game design compared to when they first spoke. Even if the change is to become crazier or drunker.

Fair enough. I'm not really good at the time thing, so I have no idea when most of the quotes being quoted written, or when the Tomes stuff was written for that matter. Just that it was in a nebulous past.

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The stay at home hacker is corrosive to cooperative storytelling, because he does his thing while the other players twiddle their thumbs, and then he twiddles his thumbs while the other players do things. People literally leave the table.

The main problem with the hacker in Shadowrun wasn't that he didn't have to travel with the group. If the game was set up right, you can definitely represent a hacker as being some dude in a van providing support to the main group who accomplishes the mission.

But Shadowrun really didn't do that, Shadowrun did something far worse. They gave the hacker his own game. When you're traversing the matrix, you're basically doing your own side dungeon. And that's why everyone walks away. Whether your hacker's PC is physically with the group or not, the moment the hacker decides to do something, it means everyone else in the group can't do anything.

To make matters worse, if your adventure is a data retrieval, then it literally hinges on the hacker succeeding. You get him to some computer terminal and he jacks in, and then it's totally up to him. If he botches the job, well there goes the mission. You more or less hope as a GM that you can arrange some kind of firefight for the group in the outside world simply to keep them occupied while the hacker traverses the Matrix security.

The main problem with Shadowrun hacking is it needs to happen a lot faster. Hacking someone's cyberarm needs to be mechanically closer to casting a wizard debuff spell where it resolves in a few dice rolls. Hacking in general is way too complicated, in every edition of Shadowrun. I don't know of any group that doesn't ban deckers/hackers, regardless of edition. Usually the decking part is done by some NPC you have to escort or you're given missions that don't require hacking.

Bingo.

The problem is not that the decker is not physically present with the group - its perfectly possible to have meaningful in-world interaction remotely between characters - the problem is the decker is playing another game entirely. He is already playing Smash Bros at this point.

[codeGlaze]

It's a kludge against reality to say "no motherfucker you have to be there", but then again, real hacking isn't anything like SR hacking anyway, so why be a slave to reality?

I'm not an expert, but, "sneak in, get passwords, get physical access to the computers, and hack them there," seems like an eminently plausible story.

Realistically it's a lot easier to hack a network from the inside, anyway.

Especially if that network isn't connected to the outside world.

[Cyberzombie]

Realistically it's a lot easier to hack a network from the inside, anyway.

Especially if that network isn't connected to the outside world.

Yeah, the Shadowrun node architecture is weird, because in the real world, your big security tends to exist near the outside, where your network meets the internet. In the SR world, the highest security nodes are in the inside, which means that it really doesn't matter if you bypass the outer security by doing an inside hack.

Why they went that route, I really don't know.

[silva]

Because they based the matrix on the idea of a digital dungeon, where big bosses (Black Ice in this case) are in the center ?

[codeGlaze]

Because they tried makeing the matrix seem like a digital version of a dungeon, where big badass bosses are in the center or something ?

You could have some pretty epic security at the "gates" of the company and still maintain "tough" security inside the company. Represented by user access restrictions in the form of more difficult security nodes. You can even keep the "boss" at the center as a "last ditch security effort".

That has the added benefit of promoting deckers going on physical runs, and also means only "the best of the best" (read, high level) deckers could even get remote access.

Or just keep the uber-confidential stuff on a separate network entirely, with no outside access.

[OgreBattle]

A wizard casting 'knock' and messing with people's minds is what I want from a Decker.

[Username17]

Shadowrun posits security systems that can literally kill people. I could see a pretty good argument for keeping such systems surrounded by lesser security systems meant to keep children out. If people got murder zapped in the brain for accidentally clicking on the members only login, I could see your corporation suffering some nasty PR events.

-Username17

[Nath]

As far as real-life networks are concerned, that's not as crazy as it may look on the surface.

A lot of organizations only have their "outer network" secured because that's less work that way. They just don't bother to do any security on the "inner network".
But if you're willing to secure every part of your network, then the inner one will be much more robust.

The outer network will connect to lot of different things: outside customers and contractors systems, software updates, employees' personal mails and leisure time activities... So it is very difficult to detect threats. One of your customer remap its network, and its a whole new range of IP address that appear in the access log, the IT services test a new app and you get unusual port numbers in and out, and so on.

The inner network may be much easier to police, because you know the list of machines from the outer network that are allowed to access it, using specified programs, protocols and port numbers, which account user is inside the office at any given hour. Connect a new computer: alarm. Run a new program: alarm.
That does not mean it can't be hacked. But hacking the outer network may seem trivial in comparison.

[silva]

Just out of curiosity, how other games deal with the issue ?

Leverage RPG, Gurps cyberpunk, Eclipse Phase, Cyberpunk 2020, Cybergeneration, Ex Machina, Freemarket, Technoir, etc. are all games that deal with the issue somehow. I find it hard to believe none of them havent had a better implementation of the concept than Shadowrun, or at least some idea that couldnt provide useful for it.

[kzt]

Yeah, the Shadowrun node architecture is weird, because in the real world, your big security tends to exist near the outside, where your network meets the internet. In the SR world, the highest security nodes are in the inside, which means that it really doesn't matter if you bypass the outer security by doing an inside hack.

Why they went that route, I really don't know.

Because they have no clue. Really. Have you ever met the developers?

Don't get me wrong, trying to do a computer hacking game that isn't full of "and now I wait from someone to click on my malware link in that email" is not easy, but they have no clue where to start.

[silva]

Because they have no clue. Really.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

[RadiantPhoenix]

Realistically it's a lot easier to hack a network from the inside, anyway.

Especially if that network isn't connected to the outside world.

I'm pretty sure that, for stuff you really, really want secure at all costs, a network isolated by a Faraday cage is the winning move, because the only counter is something that works on everything: a physical dungeon-crawl through your facilities.

In addition to feeling more plausible to me, it's better for the game, because it means the party is encouraged to stick together.

[rasmuswagner]

In my homebrewed Cyberpunk RPG, which is absolutely flawless - that is, unwritten and unplayed - the answer to luddism is "nanites". Or dirt-cheap microbots. That is, every single piece of electronic equipment ever will be network-connected even if you just leave it on a table for a few hours. Invisible physical intrusion technology is just that omnipresent. "off-line" means "clean room" with airlocks.

[silva]

I'm pretty sure that, for stuff you really, really want secure at all costs, a network isolated by a Faraday cage is the winning move, because the only counter is something that works on everything: a physical dungeon-crawl through your facilities.

In addition to feeling more plausible to me, it's better for the game, because it means the party is encouraged to stick together.

But, as cyberzombie stated earlier, its not a problem that the decker´s meat body is 1 mile away from the group. Whats important is that he is present there with his mind. Its a staple of the cyberpunk genre that the decker giives support from afar (damn, even in the own Shadowrun fiction its true, just look at how Dodger works in the Never Deal with a Dragon series). The real problem is the disconnection caused by the rules. The decker shouldnt play his own mini-game, or if there is a mini-game to play, it souldnt be alienating as its now - instead it should be simpler, faster and integrated with the group.

The Shadowrun idea of different realities cross-imposing on the same situation (astral, virtual, physical) is neat in theory, but problematic in practice. The ideal solution shouldnt be to extinguish that concept, but to fix it.

[name_here]

In my homebrewed Cyberpunk RPG, which is absolutely flawless - that is, unwritten and unplayed - the answer to luddism is "nanites". Or dirt-cheap microbots. That is, every single piece of electronic equipment ever will be network-connected even if you just leave it on a table for a few hours. Invisible physical intrusion technology is just that omnipresent. "off-line" means "clean room" with airlocks.

That's still susceptible to a faraday cage. Doesn't matter how many signals are getting sent if none of them leave the room.

[RadiantPhoenix]

That's still susceptible to a faraday cage. Doesn't matter how many signals are getting sent if none of them leave the room.

It solves the problem of runners dropping out.

[Mask_De_H]

Couldn't you also collapse the hacker and face archetype? Using social conditioning or whatever on the outside, slinging code on the inside? Fundamentally, you'd want to make "hacking" a simple thing like "lockpicking" or "stealth" instead of giving it a completely separate minigame that only one archetype can play. If hacking needs a specific minigame, go Tron/Futurama with it and having the hacker "upload" the characters into cyberspace to deal with security dungeons.

The basic thing is: you can't have a part of your game that lasts longer than a few minutes where the answer to most archetypes asking "what can I do" is "sweet fuck-all".

[Seerow]

Honestly, I'm not convinced "Hacking" needs to be a big character archtype in the game.

Seriously every attempt to implement it as such has resulted in a bunch of bullshit rules, and a group of people being pissed off that the rules didn't match with their expectations.

So fuck it. You have hollywood style hacking (ie "I can hack. So I sit in front of a computer for a couple seconds and accomplish whatever computer related thing is related to the plot").



That said, I would be very interested in seeing something similar to Mass Effect style engineers in game. Instead of worrying about hacking, they just use "tech powers" which include shit like "I generate a forcefield around myself and/or allies", "I can throw fireballs at people" "I make technology I don't like explode" and so on. Just give the techy character cool shit to do that doesn't necessarily involve hacking past cyber defenses, and you're fine. I'm sure you can technobabble some reason why it's got as much of a buy-in to do as Magic, so every sammy in the world doesn't start using tech powers (but even if they do, is that a bad thing?)

[TheNotoriousAMP]

I'm pretty sure that, for stuff you really, really want secure at all costs, a network isolated by a Faraday cage is the winning move, because the only counter is something that works on everything: a physical dungeon-crawl through your facilities.

In addition to feeling more plausible to me, it's better for the game, because it means the party is encouraged to stick together.

But, as cyberzombie stated earlier, its not a problem that the decker´s meat body is 1 mile away from the group. Whats important is that he is present there with his mind. Its a staple of the cyberpunk genre that the decker giives support from afar (damn, even in the own Shadowrun fiction its true, just look at how Dodger works in the Never Deal with a Dragon series). The real problem is the disconnection caused by the rules. The decker shouldnt play his own mini-game, or if there is a mini-game to play, it souldnt be alienating as its now - instead it should be simpler, faster and integrated with the group.

The Shadowrun idea of different realities cross-imposing on the same situation (astral, virtual, physical) is neat in theory, but problematic in practice. The ideal solution shouldnt be to extinguish that concept, but to fix it.

I personally feel the solution ironically comes in rejigging how magic in Shadowrun works. Mages basically work like wizards do in just about any other game, admittedly with the addition of strain to add some constraint to their power. However, since they basically already are a steady buffer/debuffer, the hacker really doesn't have anything special to do. As mentioned before, they take far too long to shut down an implant, amongst other things. A possible solution I tested, in the same troll street sammie game, was to apply the healing spell penalties, where each point of essence lost by the target reduced the dice pool, to damage and area effect spells. Magic should always be screwed up by loss of essence, its not just the machine, its the willful choice to modify a living body with a machine. That puts it at a whole nother level than a simple tool. In short, the idea was that a cybered guy, especially a damn near fully robotic bloke, was sort of like a blank in 40k, a walking magic fuck-upper.

This helped balance the hacker and the mage, since they already serve sort of the same role. Information retrieval and debuffing/buffing, with the addition of damage output for the mage. It also gave Street Sammies an interesting role as a hard counter to enemy mages. It basically went hackers countered sammies and riggers countered mages who countered hackers. In short, information beats hard technology beats spirit beats information. The way mages worked in against hackers was thanks to their ability to detect folks and objects and thus track down the fucker. I gave them a little bit of a technomancer flair in that they could trace the "presence" of the digital mind wreaking havoc back to a rough location, from which allies of the party or corps security could attack. Admittedly this was far from perfect and really only worked because I knew my players well and could design missions around this mod.

The hacking minigame in regards to comlinks and cybered objects itself needs to be simplified, and the suggestion of the tactical network made in the other thread gives some options too. A hacker should cast "spells" at cybertech much like a mage, with the cybered person getting counterspell equivalent to represent the shield of his stuff. He could also do the same to the group tac net, representing an attempt to hack into the groups network, which could then give his own party an accuracy boost, or other buffs, representing them knowing what their enemy is doing. The only time the hacker should be brought off the table is when doing the serious shit, hacking fully into corps sec and not a glorified iphone.

As for hacking corps sec, in this case I really don't know how much can really be done to change things. Legwork wise, I tend to have my mister johnson contact people over skype during the week before we get together and then resolve information retrieval individually with them, so they show up with the info at the session and if there is a hack to be done before the mission I already handled it. During combat I basically treat the hacker and the ic as a set of enemies who can only target each other and if its happening when other people aren't in combat, then there's really nothing to be done. People get snacks, hacker plays.

None of this is perfect by any means and a lot of it is thanks to having a group of people I know well and trust, but with a ton of revisions certain things (more mage like hackers and street sammies messing with mages) can help give the hacker more of a role in combat. As for his separate minigame, just like the mage's stuff, its sort of like the hardcoding of quadratic wizards in dnd, its baked into the game so badly I doubt its changeable by now.

[TheFlatline]

From the other thread:

It's a kludge against reality to say "no motherfucker you have to be there", but then again, real hacking isn't anything like SR hacking anyway, so why be a slave to reality?

I'm not an expert, but, "sneak in, get passwords, get physical access to the computers, and hack them there," seems like an eminently plausible story.

That probably represents less than 5% of network intrusions. That figure goes way up if you count "Bob uses Jim's password to log in to save time", which is technically an unauthorized access, but whatever.

The way it works now is that huge password databases have been compromised and now there are some extremely elegant rules-based variations and dictionary attacks. Hackers know more about user password psychology than any sysadmin due to three or four massive multi-million password databases being cracked. Using a 10-12,000 dollar multiple GPU parallel system you can try around 500 *billion* NTLM hashes per second. And that was 2 years ago. Technology has only gotten better and cheaper.

Since we're lazy humans and frequently reuse passwords, and those password databases frequently contain email addresses that rarely change, odds are you have a large number of people in your password database who you've already hacked their email. At that point password retrieval is usually trivial.

When a new company is hacked through some web-based exploit, you get names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Frequently you get encrypted passwords too. Instead of trying to reverse that encryption, they simply run their massive dictionary attack through the password engine and see what matches.

As for strong boarder security, even that's not necessarily the case. Look at Target. They had an unsecured RDP connection directly into the inside of the network, so once one person's password that used RDP became compromised through malware, the whole fucking kingdom was open.

Anyway, my point was that the vast majority of hacks in the real world happen remotely, and flipping that around to make most hacks occur on site is actually counter to reality, but is totally acceptable to make the game more fun.

[phlapjackage]

Yeah, reality and matrix rules need to be distant, distant cousins - like, so far apart that they might not actually be blood-related and could totally get drunk and hook up and not feel guilty afterwards.

Anyway, mages able to astrally project create the same problem here - the character's meatbody doesn't have to accompany the team during a run. But with grounding being taken out of the equation and the no-crossing-planes rule, it's just so much less effective to astral-tag-along than to physically be there and maybe go astral on-site as the opportunity presents itself.

So it seems that the mage conundrum has been fixed in that area with actual rules, in that sure you can go to a place astrally while your team is actually there, but it's not nearly as useful as going along with the team.

I'd think this same solution could also apply to the hacker - make it so the rules allow astral-overwatch-from-afar, just make it much less effective than if the hacker is physically present during the run. Incremental bonuses for hacking things closer to you, hacking with LOS only, etc. (I THINK SR5 tried to sorta fix this with Noise, but I don't think it really worked or makes sense with the "mesh wireless network" idea, and also fuck SR5).

A big problem I see with this is that the idea of the lone hacker, the hacker who stays in his darkened cave/room/vehicle and hacks from afar...this trope seems so engrained in our psyche and our culture, I think many people wouldn't be ok with disallowing it or making it a much inferior choice.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

As for strong boarder security, even that's not necessarily the case. Look at Target. They had an unsecured RDP connection directly into the inside of the network, so once one person's password that used RDP became compromised through malware, the whole fucking kingdom was open.

Anyway, my point was that the vast majority of hacks in the real world happen remotely, and flipping that around to make most hacks occur on site is actually counter to reality, but is totally acceptable to make the game more fun.

However, the real important hacks (serious opposition) often require a physical way into the system. The STUXNET virus, which was so effective against Iran's centrifuges, had to be installed manually. The classic example is basically dropping a usb drive or disc near the site, someone picks it up and plugs it in. In fact, this is the way most serious hacks happen, it basically comes down to tricking someone on the inside into allowing data onto their network, be it through the random usb they spotted, or through email viruses and the like.

The Target hack blends well with this. For those to expand on what Flatline said, the Target hack was pulled off because a bloke at a ventilation and air conditioning vender, who had the contract for Target stores in the region, was tricked into opening an email from what seemed to be a trusted confidante within the workplace. In short, a moron at a small company opened up some bad email. The vending company had an automatic billing service with Target, meaning that they had direct access to the larger network.

How does this translate into Shadowrun? Legwork, legwork, legwork. For the purpose of drama (and, probably for futurism's sake, we can plausibly see data being better protected in da future) on site hacking should still be happening. However, you shouldn't be accessing a major corps servers from it and if you are you shouldn't be able to go far before the itsy bitsy spider comes out to play. Or the large corps obviously knows it was hacked and wipes its system of your little spies. Instead, a major hack should rest on the ability of the runners to identify smaller companies with an in into the network, conducting a run on them to place their usb or blackmail to get an employee to bring in their virus into the larger network, and then plying that in for the data they need, be it access into the corp's network when they hit the corp (recognized by the corps servers, allowing you to pull data without hacking or being recognized), or going Target and placing tracers into the system. Right now it seems Shadowrun hacking is all about Shadowrun's combat minigame, it would be cool to see it become more like what actual game is about, research, planning and then leveraging the small weak points in the otherwise untouchable corps into big gains.

[codeGlaze]

Didn't they need a physical way into the system because the system wasn't connected to the outside world?

I completely understand that the vast majority of hacking is specialized to steal people's monetize-able information, but in a setting like Shadowrun where the cyber world is suppose to be even more omni-present (and more dangerous) it would make sense that network isolation would still be a common security tactic for the kind of information Shadowrunners are utilized to steal. Banks, since the 70s (at least) have been using shielded cable and other security measures to prevent people from sitting outside their buildings and stealing information. Unfortunately I don't remember the specifics of why it was needed so long ago, the conversation this stems from is about 6 months old and I have a terrible memory (pretty sure it had to do with actual people sitting outside actual banks with recording equipment).

So it's really not all that far fetched to think that inside corporate complex there is an internal network that is not just isolated but probably shielded from the outside, too. Whether the shielding is build into the walls or it's some sort of jamming or sci-fi widdly-wank.

Even assuming that an 'ultra secure' isolated network was in actuality "semi" isolated because they allow connection through one specific channel of contact, that one connection could conceivably just not be worth attempting to hack because it's use is so heavily regulated/monitored/etc.

[Cyberzombie]

I would generally avoid using real-life hacking too extensively. Mostly because real-life hacking is boring, and not the kind of real-time action-based hacks you want in an RPG. For a plausible explanation, It's also possible that a lot of security has gone beyond simple passwords. Given neural interface technology, you may have some of neural hashcode or even some kind of neural "stamp" of sorts on an individuals brain that can be used as a passcode that the user himself doesn't even know. Even low level individuals can have an RFID stored password. Antivirus scanners are probably powerful enough to root out any kind of email viruses/trojans such that they're no longer a problem. All that kind of stuff would effectively eliminate the social engineering kind of attacks that predominate modern computer hacks.

Possibly once you've broken into a system once, you can create a fake account, but breaking into systems should generally be about exploiting software bugs and other easily abstracted things that your hacking rolls are assumed to be representing. That'd give you the cinematic fast-paced hacking you want for an RPG and eliminate a lot of the real-world computer baggage that makes the system far more cumbersome than it has to be.

[Concise Locket]

"Guy who's good with computers" should never be the defining role of a PC in any action game. In the abstract I can understand the appeal of the autistic savant who develops a semi-sapient bot that can trash a corporate database and steal the goodies. But it's a lot more fun for the party as a whole, to have someone sweet-talk the wage-slave receptionist into giving a black-hat access to the server cabinet. And it keeps the hacker out of the basement.

Blend the face sub-archetype with the hacker archetype and design a rules set that combines social skills with quick technology resolution. No more digital dungeon crawls, no more competing with mages.