The FBI has been called in to investigate last week’s hack of HBO, the entertainment network, as the true scale of the data breach emerges.
The unidentified hackers, who struck on Thursday, have released spoilers for episodes of Game of Thrones and complete unseen episodes of other series. They claim to have stolen 1.5 terabytes of data, equivalent to scores of HDTV episodes, or millions of emails, and have threatened to leak more content.
Three years ago hackers sponsored by North Korea caused serious embarrassment and financial damage to Sony Pictures by leaking only 200 gigabytes (0.2 terabytes) of stolen data.
HBO has sent a legal notice to force Google to remove search results for leaked files. Richard Plepler, its chief executive, said in an email to staff that HBO did not believe its email system as a whole was compromised. However, he also said the company was hiring an outside contractor to provide credit monitoring to employees, suggesting there are fears that personal or financial information was stolen.
The hackers have already leaked what appears to be the personal data of at least one senior executive, including details of her finances and health plan.
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The group is not known to have issued any ransom notice so their motive remains unclear. Security researchers said the hack could be the handiwork of state-sponsored hackers owing to the similarities with the Sony attack, but insider involvement was also possible.
In the case of Sony, the hackers demanded that executives pull a comedy film, The Interview, depicting the imagined assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Sony complied.
There is no such obvious geopolitical motive in this case.
Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey, said: “Before assuming it is a ‘sophisticated’ attack one should explore the insider threat fully: it is a lot more common than people realise.
“Attribution of these attacks is notoriously difficult. Was it a nation state? There probably isn’t any evidence at present. Even when an investigation is more advanced you tend to find that evidence of national state involvement is circumstantial. When, as with Sony, states are named by the authorities it tends to be based not so much on the electronic evidence but in associated intelligence.”