The news broke earlier this week that HBO was targeted in a hack, and now The Hollywood Reporter claims that the FBI and the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which led the investigation into the Sony hack, have gotten involved. Hackers have already released links to a script for an upcoming Game of Thrones episode, as well as episodes of Ballers and Room 104, and reportedly around 1.5 terabytes of HBO data has been compromised. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly seven times the amount of data released in the infamous Sony hack – in that case, hackers claimed to have stolen around 100 terabytes, though they released about 200 gigabytes. The data stolen from HBO could include episodes of television, financial documents, company emails, as well as customer information, and the hackers haven’t made any ransom demands, according to THR’s sources, so it’s maddeningly hard to predict what they could do with the information. Like Euron Greyjoy eliminating the Sand Snakes, the pirates have taken the upper hand.
Update, 4:55 p.m.: In a company email, CEO Richard Plepler told HBO employees, “At this time, we do not believe that our e-mail system as a whole has been compromised, but the forensic review is ongoing. We are also in the process of engaging an outside firm to work with our employees to provide credit monitoring and we will be following up with those details.”
