About

Walt Disney Hackerino, or simply Hackerino is a viral video of two Italian hackers in a Mickey Mouse and Robot masks trying to hack the US military server in order to obtain database and distribute its content before they were tracked down and have to shut the server down to avoid it, all while delivering the iconic line "Ci stanno tracciando! Stacca, stacca! Stacca!" (They're tracking us! Unplug, unplug! Unplug!). Although it was allegedly recorded in 1991, it wasn't until 2006 when one of the owners of the Decoder magazine published the video on YouTube, instantly becoming an internet meme in Italy.

Context

Decoder, or Decoder. Rivista Internazionale Underground was a Milan-based, cyberpunk-style magazine that ran from 1987 to 1998. Its content revolved around post-punk culture that was very popular in the Italian underground community at the time, as well as hacking culture and Avant-pop.^[1]

In 1991, the editorial staff anonymously received a VHS copy of the footage, which shows two presumed hackers, one with a Mickey Mouse mask with the pseudonym of "Mickey", while the other is wearing a robot mask under the pseudonym of "Uomo d'Acciaio" (Man of Steel), who remains silent throughout the whole footage. According to "Mickey", the two wanted to hack and recover data from the United States military database and distribute its content found in counter-information circuits.

Using an Amiga 500 computer, they claimed to have used a packet-switched network that connected them to the Byte Information Exchange (BIX), which was one of the biggest widespread networks in America at the time, and "Mickey" claimed that it took them 3 days to discover the special access code, as they wanted to gain access its shared network database between the US and the Sovient Union. As they're receiving information, the B.I.X. tracking system detected an intrusion, leading to the hackers to forcefully shut the computer's power supply in order to avoid getting caught. It's never confirmed if the footage was a hoax or not, given the scarcity of information about it. The true identities of "Mickey" and "Uomo d'Acciaio" are unknown to this day.

In October 2006, one of the ex editors of the Decoder Magazine, Ermanno Guarneri, decided to upload the entire footage on his gommatv YouTube account under the title of "Mickey Mouse Hacks a Military Computer", gathering 2.9 million views and 97.368 likes over the coming years.

The most notable part of the video came at the end, where "Mickey" starts to panic about the system tracking them down and he shouts "Ci stanno tracciando! Stacca, stacca! Stacca!" while shutting off the computer.

The video went viral across the internet in Italy as users found the footage of the hacking hilarious, especially the last part.

External References