In July this year, cyber crooks launched a cyber attack on the database of Hollywood Box Office(HBO) to steal 1.5 terabytes of proprietary data which includes few episodes of “Game of Thorns- Season 7”.
After getting hold of the data, the hacker named “Mr. Smith” demanded a ransom of several million dollars worth in bitcoins in exchange of the leaked data. Furthermore, the hacker issued a warning to the HBO officials that if they fail to pay the ransom within a couple of days, the leaked data will be dumped onto the dark web.
When FBI was pressed into the probe, it discovered that the data was leaked as soon as the hackers got hold of the email credentials of Leslie Cohen, HBO’s Vice President for film programming.
Since, HBO failed to react to the hacker’s call, few episodes of “Game of Thornes” containing the water mark “ HBO is Falling” were leaked to the web. After two days time details such as emails, financial balance sheets, employment agreements and marketing strategies also emerged on the web.
On Wednesday night this week, a hacking group named “ OurMine” gained access to the Twitter accounts of HBO. It left a message to the HBO that “ Ourmine is here, we are just testing your security- Please contact us to upgrade the security-ourmine.org→ contact”
A second tweet which surfaced this early morning on HBO’s official twitter page reads “Let’s make #HBOHacked Trending!”
The other twitter accounts linked to the HBO’s official twitter page were also hacked and that includes the accounts of shows such as “Last week Tonight”, “Veep”, “The Leftovers”, “Looking”, “Silicon Valley”, “True Blood”, and “Vinyl”
When contacted, HBO said that the investigation on its twitter hack is still going on and so asked the press to wait for the latest to publish.
And in another incident which stands as a faux pas, one of the upcoming episode of “Game of Thorns” was accidentally aired on HBO Nordic and HBO Espana Platforms for 1 full hour. The channel authorities later learned about the blunder and apologized for the technical blooper created by some of its staff members.
