New America's Peter Singer and Passcode's Sara Sorcher interview Walter Parkes, the noted screenwriter-turned-film producer who’s behind many of your all time favorite cybersecurity movies: Sneakers and WarGames. They talk about the hacker archetypes depicted in pop culture, why these movies resonate with this community, how fiction sometimes inspires real policy change in this field – and whose cybersecurity work he finds most fascinating. 

Ben Heyes, chief information security & trust officer at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, also joins the podcast this episode to discuss how the changing landscape of cyberthreats; comparisons between the way US financial institutions and Commonwealth – the largest bank in the entire Southern Hemisphere – approach cybersecurity; and how to navigate cultural differences when operating in many countries. 

This episode sponsored by Dell.