A new email arrived from “Mr. Smith” yesterday. It announced that the HBO “Giphy” platform had been hacked by the same group that hacked Game of Thrones.
But it was more than just the GIPHY program access that was hacked. Attached to the email from Mr. Smith was a file with HBO’s passwords for all of their social media accounts. DataBreaches.net is not reproducing the information here, but the hack is so widely known by now that this site hopes HBO has changed all its passwords already.
The hackers took advantage of the access to create their own GIPHYs. Here’s a sample from the 17 image files that Mr. Smith sent out to journalists:
The other images were in a similar vein, revealing the url of the now-disabled data dump that the hackers called “Wave 4,” and also revealing their email address on a Russian service.
It seems clear by now – at least to this blogger – that HBO is not going to pay the hackers any money and won’t even negotiate at this point. So what will the hackers do now? My guess is that they will dump Episode 7 of Game of Thrones and that they will dump whatever else they have obtained – presumably as a warning to other future victims.
Note that DataBreaches.net did send an inquiry to Mr. Smith asking if they were TheDarkOverlord or if TheDarkOverlord was involved in this hack at all. This site has not received a direct answer. And while there are dissimilarities between the HBO hack and incidents claimed by TheDarkOverlord, there are so many similarities that I think the involvement of TDO in this HBO incident must remain an open question for now. But if my hypothesis is correct, then don’t be surprised to see them dump Episode 7 and other files – assuming they have acquired them.