Hardened Electronics

I am going to start off by stepping out of the Matrix world for a second to explore something equally as iconic; James Bond. I am going to guess that if you have not been living off your own excrement for the past 20 years, you have at least a passing knowledge of the movie Goldeneye.  If you do, you might remember part of the plot involved a pre-”Jean Grey” Famke Jansen stealing a helicopter using her thighs. The whole reason she and the other villains took it was because it was “hardened”, meaning it was built with electronics that could shrug off the radiation ionization caused by a sudden pulse of electromagnetism… otherwise known as an “EMP”, the human resistance’s sole weapon against the machines in the real world. I mention this because Goldeneye came out years before the first Matrix movie, and the ideas behind that whole thing have been around since the Cold War was actually a thing, meaning that the machines would probably A) have a working knowledge of hardening and B) would probably work that shit into every last piece of hardware they built. Think about it, you have access to technology that makes you essentially impervious to your enemy, why not use it?

Packet Sniffers

For anyone who has ever set up a network, home or otherwise, we all know security is a big deal. Even if you just know that “they” can sneak around your network if you don’t secure it, you are at least somewhat aware of the fact that there are programs out there that let people look at information passing from computer to computer and analyze it. Given the right kind of thinking and hardware, they can pull your personal information right out of thin air, right? Like maybe a giant godamn hovercraft broadcasting information into your network? The basic idea is that the machines likely could have looked at the data passing between these ships and their own network to find out who is poking around in their system and kill them. Or, you know, use a freaking firewall.