Netflix’s new thriller Zero Day, starring Robert De Niro, is one of the streaming giant’s biggest shows in the world right now. The star-studded drama dives into the terrifying possibility of a nationwide cyberattack crippling the United States’ critical infrastructure, with its narrative blending political conspiracy with a coordinated digital assault that disrupts everything from power grids to financial systems.
While the series makes for gripping entertainment, however, cybersecurity experts have weighed in on just how much of what’s shown is grounded in reality — and where Hollywood has taken, shall we say, liberties with how something like this might actually unfold.
“It’s a compelling watch,” James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate at IT security company KnowBe4, says about Zero Day. “But cyber warfare is often more complex and methodical and takes place in the shadows long before it ever reaches public awareness.”
The show, he goes on, correctly highlights the vulnerabilities inherent in critical infrastructure like energy grids and telecommunications. He also notes that the show’s depiction of “advanced persistent threats” — cyberattacks where hackers maintain long-term access to systems — reflects a real concern within the cybersecurity community. However, he thinks the scale of the attack depicted in Zero Day somewhat strains credulity.
“A synchronized cyberattack taking down critical infrastructure across multiple sectors simultaneously would require immense coordination, pre-existing access, and unprecedented sophistication,” he says.
Martin Jartelius is chief information security officer at Outpost24, which helps companies improve their cyber resilience, and he echoes that same sentiment — pointing out that cyberattacks are rarely so sweeping or perfectly executed. “Cyberattacks rarely hit every system simultaneously across multiple industries, platforms, and networks. Most physical systems have failovers to prevent total failure.”
In reality, power grids, subways, and nuclear plants often have manual overrides that would mitigate the kind of cascading chaos depicted in the show.
One of the more grounded aspects of Zero Day is its portrayal of cybercriminals leaving backdoors in systems for future access — a common tactic in real-world cybercrime. McQuiggan praises this detail, adding that the show also accurately depicts the difficulty of attributing cyberattacks to specific perpetrators. “Cyber attribution is notoriously difficult,” he says. “Attackers use proxies, stolen credentials, and false flags to obscure their origins, sometimes taking months or years to unravel.”
However, the show ventures into science fiction territory with its depiction of malware capable of instantly disabling infrastructure or seamlessly running across all operating systems. Chris Hauk, consumer privacy champion at Pixel Privacy, acknowledges that while advancements in AI might one day make such attacks more plausible, they remain beyond current capabilities. “AI can write the source code for an application across various operating systems, but we’re not quite at the point where malware could learn on the fly to infect entirely new systems,” he says.
Despite its technical exaggerations, cybersecurity professionals agree that Zero Day serves an important purpose — raising awareness about the increasing threat of cyberattacks. The need to fortify our digital defenses is more urgent than ever, even if the digital apocalypse presented in Netflix’s series isn’t necessarily imminent. “The entertainment industry often sacrifices technical accuracy for storytelling, and that’s okay,” Jartelius says. “Just don’t use it as a cybersecurity training manual.”
