“We Spared No Expense”: The Real Security Failure of Jurassic Park
By: Paco Campbell
Published: Monday, October 20th, 2025
There are movies that age beautifully — like fine wine, practical effects, or Jeff Goldblum.
And then there are movies that age accurately — Jurassic Park manages to do both.
That first reveal still gives me chills. Dr. Grant stands up in the Jeep, mouth open, sunglasses dangling in disbelief. John Williams’ score swells, the camera pans, and boom — there it is. A living, breathing dinosaur. No irony, no wink at the audience, no postmodern filter. Just Spielberg flexing absolute command of tone and pacing.
There is a motherf***ing dinosaur on screen.
Not a wireframe render. Not a placeholder.
A dinosaur that feels real, even thirty years later.
Compare that to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone — and sorry, Potterheads — where the Quidditch scene looks like someone hung action figures from fishing line and called it a day. The difference isn’t just budget or technology. It’s intent. Jurassic Park’s effects team didn’t just rely on the new toys; they used technology to serve the story. They grounded the spectacle in reality. You believed because they made you want to.
And ironically, it’s that same belief — that blind faith in technology — that doomed Jurassic Park.
The Nedry Problem: A Security Fable
Let’s address the elephant in the room. You know where I’m going. Yes, this analysis isn’t novel — many in the security world have already used Jurassic Park as a cautionary tale. CyberArk broke down how Dennis Nedry functioned as an insider threat by crippling systems in minutes. The Cloud Security Alliance ran a piece called “Jurassic Access,” highlighting how Nedry’s excessive privileges broke the park’s IAM.
But what I want you to take away isn’t merely “Jurassic Park was bad at cybersecurity.” It’s the sociotechnical failure: the fragile, toxic power structure around Nedry. He wasn’t just a system component — he was the vulnerability.
Dennis Nedry, the park’s lead programmer, was given god-mode access to every system on the island — security gates, power distribution, communications, even the visitor compound locks. One man held the keys to everything. Literally everything.
This isn’t clever storytelling; it’s a textbook failure of basic information security principles.
Single point of failure? Check.
No separation of duties? Check.
No logging, no change control, no redundancy? Triple check.
Jon Hammond built a billion-dollar park filled with prehistoric predators and entrusted its entire digital nervous system to a single disgruntled sysadmin who was underpaid and overconfident. What could possibly go wrong?
(Spoiler alert: building in Orlando would not solve any of this.)
The moment Nedry spins his chair, smirks, and says, “Ah ah ah, you didn’t say the magic word,” every CISO/CIO/CTO in the audience collectively clenches. Because we’ve all seen that guy. The gatekeeper. The one who thinks “security through obscurity” is a feature, not a bug. The one who builds fragile systems so only they can fix them. The one who hides complexity behind jargon to stay indispensable.
Nedry didn’t just sabotage the park — he was the sabotage.
Privilege, in the Wrong Hands
Let’s talk about privilege. Not the philosophical kind — the Unix kind.
It’s a Unix system… I know this!
The principle of least privilege is one of the oldest, most essential rules in security. It’s so simple it fits on a T-shirt:
“Give people only the access they need to do their job.”
Nedry violated that in every possible way. His access was so broad that disabling a few systems effectively paralyzed the entire park. And because there were no secondary accounts, no logging, and no proper change management, no one could even see what he’d done until it was too late.
When Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Ray Arnold, tries to debug the system, he’s locked out. The system might as well be air-gapped. They can’t override Nedry’s code, can’t restore from backup, can’t even identify which subsystems are down because all the monitoring tools are routed through — you guessed it — Nedry’s permissions.
(If this sounds like Land Rover or Asahi Beer — both recently paralyzed by cyberattacks despite state-of-the-art systems — well, reality’s got better writers than Spielberg.)
In modern terms, Nedry wasn’t just an administrator; he was a privileged identity with zero oversight. Hammond didn’t just fail to build a resilient network; he handed the kill switch to the guy least likely to handle power responsibly.
This is what happens when a company confuses trust with control.
The Illusion of Control
Hammond’s famous line, “We spared no expense,” is meant to sound reassuring — but it’s really a confession. He threw money at problems instead of solving them. He built fences higher instead of building controls smarter. He assumed complexity equaled safety.
This is the same thinking that drives organizations today to buy every shiny new cybersecurity tool on the market while ignoring basic hygiene. You can spend millions on AI-driven threat detection, but if one overprivileged user can shut down production, congratulations — you’ve just built Jurassic Park on AWS.
Hammond believed in the fantasy of total control. Nedry exploited the reality of human fragility. That’s not just movie logic; that’s every post-incident report I’ve ever read.
How IT Lost Its Soul (and Found Its Jargon)
Here’s where things get uncomfortable: Nedry isn’t an outlier. He’s a symptom. IT has a long tradition of building walls instead of bridges — of hoarding knowledge as power.
You’ve met them: the engineer who answers a question with five acronyms and a smirk. The security team that treats users like the enemy. The architect who insists “it’s too complex to explain.” Somewhere along the way, we turned curiosity into gatekeeping. We forgot that our job isn’t to mystify — it’s to protect and empower.
Information security is supposed to serve people, not humiliate them.
When Nedry laughs at the others struggling with his “magic word” lockout, it’s the ultimate act of professional arrogance. He doesn’t just break the system — he mocks anyone who doesn’t understand it. And in doing so, he perfectly embodies a kind of toxic elitism that’s still alive in parts of tech culture today.
If Jurassic Park were real, Nedry would have a Twitter account full of memes about “PEBKAC errors” and “lusers.” He’d call himself a “10x engineer.”
And the dinosaurs would still eat everyone.
What We Should’ve Learned from Isla Nublar
The genius of Jurassic Park is that it works on multiple layers — adventure, wonder, horror, and (if you squint) a surprisingly solid post-mortem on failed risk management.
Every system failure in that movie ties back to one root cause: centralized control without accountability. From the power grid to the park’s operations, everything was built for efficiency, not resilience.
And it’s not like Hammond didn’t have warnings.
Malcolm tells him straight up: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” That’s risk management 101.
But even that line misses something. Because they did think — they just assumed one man could keep it all in check.
That’s the tragic flaw of Jurassic Park. Not the hubris of science. Not chaos theory.
Just plain old bad access control.
Closing the Gates
Jurassic Park remains a masterpiece because it understands awe. It takes technology — the sterile, digital kind — and makes it feel mythic. You believe those creatures exist because every frame was built with care and intention (honestly, I’d even say love). That’s the same spirit we should bring to building systems.
When we forget that — when we let arrogance or jargon turn expertise into exclusion — we build parks that look impressive but collapse under their own design.
Nedry didn’t just open the raptor cages. He opened the door to what happens when we stop holding ourselves accountable. When we stop documenting.
When we stop sharing knowledge. When we make ourselves the magic word.
The dinosaurs were inevitable.
The outage was preventable.
#dontBeNedry!