Ugh. Because I’ve been mostly offline, I missed a narrow window during which the HBO hackers’ newest data leak – which they call “wave 4” – was available online yesterday to selected journalists. By the time I got the hackers’ notification, the data dump had been removed.
The email notification with the link to the data dump was signed with the hackers’ now-standard:
“If history repeats itself, HBO may NEVER be the same Again. Winter Really is here”HB-Old is Dying…….
You can read Mashable‘s report on what they saw of the leaked material here.
If “Mr. Smith” makes the files available again at another url, I hope I’m around in time to grab them. Whoever HBO has hired to monitor for leaks and to get them removed seems to be doing an admirable job as these dumps are being removed really quickly, and not, it seems, by the hackers.
All in all, it appears to have been a rough week for HBO so far. In addition to potential damage from Mr. Smith’s leaked material, HBO Nordic in Spain apparently goofed and aired an episode of Game of Thrones prematurely. And then today, HBO’s social media accounts were seemingly hacked and taken over by unrelated threat actors, “OurMine.”
One new piece of information I can share, however, is that the hackers did reply to an inquiry DataBreaches.net had sent them asking them how they viewed HBO’s offer of a $250,000 “bug bounty” award – whether they believed it to be a serious offer or if they viewed it merely as a delaying tactic. Their terse reply was “delaying.”
when you access the link to data dump, can these files be downloaded? or is it just lists? what kind of link is it, .onion may be?
The files had been removed, presumably by the paste site, by the time I had clicked on the link to access the dump.