A group of unknown hackers acting under the name of Mr. Smith, hacked the servers of the American cable channel HBO and demanded a ransom of $ 6 million in bitcoins for the return of information. This is reported by Bloomberg.
Among the stolen files are scenarios of five episodes of "Game of Thrones" and an email to the vice-president of HBO Film Programming Leslie Cohen.
"We successfully broke into your huge network. HBO was for us one of the difficult tasks, but we did it (it took about six months), "the text of the video from Mr. Smith, addressed to the CEO of HBO Richard Plepler.
The hackers reported that they earn on blackmail from $ 12 million a year and demanded from Plepleur within three days to pay them a "six-month salary in bitcoin", which, apparently, is at least $ 6 million.
So far, Mr. Smith posted the first five episodes of the "Game of Thrones" on the network, including an episode not yet released, and marked them with a watermark "HBO is Falling" motto. Now, intruders are threatening to disclose even more confidential information on the channel, as well as contact details of some actors.
Note that owners of the HBO channel officially confirmed the leakage of "private information" on July 31, but denied the statement that "their email was completely compromised." Now the channel continues to investigate and works with police and cyber security experts.
Recall, in late July, 35 addresses of owners of Tokens of Digix company were hacked by unknown cyber-fraudsters. Hackers stole 4162,2647 DGD tokens - the damage was about $ 260 thousand.