“The threat is real, and it’s dangerous, and it’s acute.”

If you find yourself watching political thriller Zero Day and asking yourself if the events it depicts could really happen, you aren’t alone.

In the limited series, a catastrophic cyberattack brings former US President George Mullen (Robert De Niro, who also executive-produced the series) out of retirement to find those responsible for killing thousands and unleashing chaos across the country. Created by Eric Newman and Noah Oppenheim, Zero Day, now streaming on Netflix, is a race against time as Mullen searches for the truth amid disinformation that has divided the country, while the personal ambitions of power brokers in technology, finance, and government collide, and Mullen’s personal demons wage war from within.

Angela Bassett, Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan, Connie Britton, Joan Allen, Matthew Modine, Bill Camp, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III, Gaby Hoffmann and Clark Gregg also star.

The six tense episodes sprung from the minds of Newman (Griselda, The Watcher, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico), Oppenheim, former president of NBC News, and Michael S. Schmidt, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, along with and executive producer Jonathan Glickman. Director and executive producer Leslie Linka Glatter (Homeland) then joined the creative team to bring it all together.

“This is a story about what would happen to the country if there was another attack on the level of 9/11,” Schmidt told Netflix. “If there was something majorly catastrophic that happened to our country right now, how would the country react?”

In 2012, Schmidt visited Washington, DC, for a story and heard from senior national security officials that potential cyberattacks are a constant concern. “I took them at face value that this was a problem, but one of the issues is that there was never a way to show what that really meant,” Schmidt tells Tudum.

Zero Day provided a window “to show what a catastrophic cyberattack could look like,” Schmidt explains. “I saw this as an opportunity to say, ‘OK, the federal government was never able to show the public what a cyber Pearl Harbor [or a] cyber 9/11 [could] look like. Let’s take that opportunity and provide people with an example of that.’ ”

So, could an event like the one that happens in Zero Day occur in real life? Keep reading to dig into the facts behind the show, and whether an attack like this is possible.

What does the term “zero day” mean?

In the series, “zero day” refers to the day when software is released without patches, or fixes, to protect it — leaving it vulnerable to attack. So, a zero-day attack occurs “when a piece of malware is injected or invades a piece of software at a time when it’s defenseless against that attack,” Newman explained. “The next day, there might be a patch that stops that, and at that point you would need a new zero-day attack that would get around that. It’s a level-setting term; you start over every day.”

What research went into creating Zero Day?

After discussing their collective experiences and understanding of presidential politics and national security, executive producers Oppenheim, Schmidt, and Newman turned to subject matter professionals to help fill in the blanks. That included cybersecurity expert Clint Watts, a former special agent for the FBI who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee  about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and political consultant Eric Schultz, who served as principal deputy White House press secretary during the Obama administration.

“One of the most important parts of this show was that this had to be as realistic and believable as possible,” Schmidt noted. “Yes, we have to tell a great story, and we have to have a thriller aspect to this, but it still needs to be as authentic as possible.”

Glatter, who directed all six episodes, read books like Kim Zetter’s Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon to draw inspiration. She also looked to photographers like Saul Leiter, Elliott Erwitt, and Gregory Crewdson, as well as cinematic thrillers like 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate and 1974’s The Conversation. Because Zero Day also deals with Mullen’s mental acuity and the underlying anxiety he experiences, Glatter revisited films such as The Bourne Identity, A Beautiful Mind, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

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How realistic is the timeline in Zero Day?

Within a few days of the attack, Congress votes to establish the Zero Day Commission — which President Evelyn Mitchell (Bassett) appoints Mullen to lead — to get to the bottom of what happened and prevent another attack. A month later, Mullen is testifying before congress and sharing his findings with the world. For a government known to move rather slowly, the timeline feels swift. But is it realistic?

“There’s definitely funding that is reserved for contingency and emergency situations,” political consultant Schultz explains, adding that government appointments like the Zero Day Commission can get up and running pretty quickly “when it is an exigent circumstance” like the one that occurs in Zero Day.

“I think [the show is] accurately reflecting how if Congress and the president want to move, they can move,” the former principal deputy White House press secretary adds. “As slow as the federal government can be at times, given the bureaucracy, there are moments where we can be fast and swift. I think it’s completely within reason that we could stand up a zero-day commission like we did in [Zero Day], giving it the resources it needs.”

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How accurate is the government portrayed in Zero Day?

The show’s creative team, with help from consultants like Schultz, paid strict attention to detail to ensure that officials and locations were depicted as authentically as possible. That includes the White House briefing room and the Oval Office and Outer Oval Office, which Schultz lauds as having “the right energy and the right vibe of what the real-life places in DC feel like.”

Even the smaller details, like how loudly the sergeant at arms yells when announcing Mullen and Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer’s (Modine) arrival in the House Chamber, are based on real protocol.

“There’s a ton of background noise; all these members of Congress are there talking [and] yapping it up,” says Schultz. “There needs to be a lot of noise, and then the sergeant at arms comes on top of that to make the announcement. It was just small stuff like that to make sure we got it right.”

And if you pay close attention, you’ll also notice that Mullen’s motorcade is also pretty realistic. According to Schultz, while a sitting president’s might include cars with Secret Service agents, press corps, security, medical staff, other senior members of the president’s team, and guests of the White House, a former president like Mullen might get around with just a couple cars.

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Could a zero-day attack actually happen?

Although Zero Day is a fictional story, the possibility of major cyberattack is very real, according to the experts.

“For over a decade, if not more, the government has been warning that there is a catastrophic cyberattack that could hit the country,” Schmidt noted. “Cyber 9/11, cyber Pearl Harbor — these are concepts and ideas that, when senior law enforcement and Justice Department intelligence officials go and testify before Congress, they say to Congress, ‘Look, this is a potential real problem.’ ”

The US has experienced “massive cyberattacks that have had real consequences” and that have done “real damage to collective faith in our infrastructure and in our own systems,” Schmidt said. “But that humongous, devastating cyberattack has not happened yet.”

The threat of cyberterrorism “is constantly evolving,” Schultz asserts. “The threat is real, and it’s dangerous, and it’s acute. It is up to the government working with partners in the national security space, in the private sector, [and] in the tech space to constantly be as vigilant as possible because those threats aren’t going away anytime soon — or anytime at all.”

While Watts agrees that a major cyberattack is possible, he says that one akin to what we see in Zero Day is “not likely” because of several factors, including the level of human coordination that was involved in the series. “I think this is the key point in the human dimension of the cyberattack,” Watts explains. “It’s not just that somebody typed a one instead of a zero, it’s a lot of people who were organizing to execute this in a way that it would be devastating …. It’s not just a bunch of machines doing the cyberattack, it’s a bunch of people using machines to do the cyberattack to create this effect. So, it’s highly unlikely that this situation would arise.”

“There are a lot of people around the world,” Watts adds, who are “working to stop something from happening that would be this critical, making sure that the integrity of the information world is in place. So, I don’t think people should stay up at night worried that their internet’s going to go out. I think, for the most part, we’ve got really smart people that are on this kind of stuff. But you’ve got to watch out for the bad people, not the bad machines.”

Additional reporting by Keely Flaherty.