Hackers is a 1995 American crime thriller film directed by Iain Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Renoly Santiago, Lorraine Bracco, and Fisher Stevens. The film follows a group of high school hackers and their involvement in an attempted theft. Made in the mid-1990s when the Internet was just starting to become popular among the general public, it reflects the ideals laid out in the Hacker Manifesto quoted in the film: "This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch...We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...and you call us criminals...Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity."

On August 10, 1988, 11-year-old Dade "Zero Cool" Murphy's family is fined $45,000 for his crashing of 1,507 computer systems, causing a seven-point drop in the New York Stock Exchange. He is banned from computers and touch-tone telephones until he is 18 years old.