With digital security becoming an increasingly important real world issue, it's no surprise the entertainment industry is trying to cash in. The latest in this trend of modern hacker thrillers is USA Network's Mr. Robot. This drama follows socially awkward security technician Elliot Alderson as he is inducted into a society of cyber vigilantes led by Mr. Robot, played by a scruffy Christian Slater.

From rootkits to botnets, the show certainly throws a lot of security jargon at viewers, but is it really as smart as it thinks it is? Antivirus company Avast watched the Mr. Robot premiere this week and tried to answer that question.

Monk

To help check Mr. Robot's accuracy, Avast talked with its security expert Pedram Amini. You can read the full interview here as Amini analyzes several major plot points. Be warned, it's nothing but spoilers from here on out, so if you want to experience Mr. Robot fresh, you can watch the pilot, "eps1.0_hellofriend.mov," right now for free on USA's website.

The episode opens with a tense scene in which Elliot exposes a coffee shop manager as the owner of a child pornography website. Elliot claims he did this by observing the perpetrator through the shop's public Wi-Fi network. Amini says this is a plausible scenario. If you don't protect yourself by using a Virtual Private Network, anyone with "just a little technical knowledge can download free software online and observe people's activities on open Wi-Fi."

From there, the show further confirms why it's so important to have a strong password. Elliot hacks into his therapist's accounts by combining her favorite artist Bob Dylan with her birth year backwards. Later, using some brute force and a little social engineering, he also hacks his therapist's unfaithful new lover by simply guessing his passwords. Weak passwords in the real world are also, unfortunately, commonplace.

The show's big hacking set piece occurs when the company Elliot provides security for, the loathsome E Corp, gets hit with a DDoS attack by the hacker collective looking to recruit Elliot. Amini explains how the show mixes up its terminology here. "In the end we discover that the attack on E Corp was actually based on rootkits that had subverted a variety of servers." But DDoS attacks against large corporations do also actually occur. You should regularly check your router for vulnerabilities so it can't be used by hackers in these attacks.

Burn Notice

Seeing as we've only watched one episode of Mr. Robot, it could easily leap from "surprisingly realistic digital paranoid thriller" to "cartoon techno caper" any week now. But considering the other ludicrous security-themed movies, shows, and games we've put up with in the past year or so, from CSI: Cyber to Blackhat to Watch_Dogs, Mr. Robot seems relatively grounded.

If you want to talk about the quality of Mr. Robot as a show, and not a security lecture, that's a whole other story. Rami Malek is fascinatingly off-kilter as Elliot, and totally outshines Slater, but the character's combination of self-righteous paranoia, juvenile dialogue, and sloppily handled mental illness quickly becomes tiresome.

The show is also packed with trendy references to modern pop-culture touchstones like Apple and The Hunger Games. It's trying so hard to say "Look how relevant we are!" even though in this universe everything from banking to consumer electronics is run by a single company with a logo that looks like the Dell symbol with the "D" L" and "L" removed. Mr. Robot is pretty ridiculous, but I can't quite tell if it's fun ridiculous yet.

If you're interested in hacking escapades that aren't complete fiction, you can check out Mr. Robot Wednesdays on USA Network.