Game of Thrones
stars Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, and Emilia Clark will not be happy to hear that the HBO hackers have leaked their email addresses and phone numbers in what appears to be an attempt to extort a large sum of money from HBO.
The company is the latest to have fallen prey to hackers. The attackers reportedly stole 1.5GB of data, including unreleased episodes of certain shows as well as screenplay drafts for Game of Thrones episodes. The data stash also contains other gems like the contact details of certain GoT stars, as well as email correspondence of at least one HBO executive, vice president for film programming Leslie Cohen.
Apparently, they also included data detailing HBO’s internal network and administrator passwords in the same stash of files that contains the contact information for Tyrion, Cersei, and Daenerys. According to The Guardian, the HBO hackers contacted HBO chief executive Richard Plepler, asking for a multimillion-dollar ransom to prevent the release of other TV shows and emails.
The hackers asked for “our six-month salary in bitcoin,” claiming they make anywhere from $12 million to $15 million a year from similarly blackmailing organizations they hack. They also claim they needed six months to break into HBO’s network. The TV channel, meanwhile, said that its email system as a whole had not been breached, but it did acknowledge the data theft.
HBO was the victim of a separate Game of Thrones leak late last week when the fourth episode of season 7 was posted online several days ahead of its official air date.
