Hackers once again prove that nothing online is secure, and after Defcon attendees demonstrated official voting machines are easily compromised we find HBO a victim as well. Late Sunday evening reporters were alerted to a breach of the HBO servers, with the hackers celebrating their success.
“Hi to all mankind. The greatest leak of cyber space era is happening. What’s its name? Oh I forget to tell. Its HBO and Game of Thrones……!!!!!!,” the shadowy email said.
So far, it doesn’t appear any new full episodes of Game of Thrones were stolen, but there are video outlines of Episode 3 (which just aired on Sunday) and Episode 4 airing next weekend.
Upcoming episodes of Ballers, Barry, Insecure, and Room 104, however, have apparently showed up. It total, it looks like 1.5 terabytes of data were taken from the company, but that number could easily change.
The hackers seem to taunt HBO with illustrations of the show and phrases such as “Winter is Here” and “HBO is Falling.” They tell those who download the content to spread it around.
“In a complicated operation, we successfully penetrated in to the HBO Internal Network, Emails, technical platforms, and database and got precious and confidential stuff that blaze your eyes,” the website Winter-leak.com (titled “HBO Hackers”) says on its homepage.
The hackers also include the GOT-themed email address “[email protected]” to supposedly contact them. Wouldn’t you love to see that first email that HBO sent them?
The company reacted quickly to the breach.
“HBO recently experienced a cyber incident, which resulted in the compromise of proprietary information,” said HBO in a statement. “We immediately began investigating the incident and are working with law enforcement and outside cybersecurity firms.”
Early Monday morning, HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler said to his employees, “As most of you have probably heard by now, there has been a cyber incident directed at the company which has resulted in some stolen proprietary information, including some of our programming.”
He added, “As has been the case with any challenge we have ever faced, I have absolutely no doubt that we will navigate our way through this successfully.”
Source: Entertainment Weekly
