HomeWeekly News Roundup (August 6, 2017)
A heads up – this is going to be another short one for you, as it’s been a relatively quiet week again. And just because the news stories this week all revolve around Game of Thrones, it does not mean that I’ve spent the last week bingeing on old and new episodes of the hit HBO show and this is the actual reason why I haven’t bothered to write up any news stories. No, this is definitely not the case.
Game of Thrones making all the wrong headlines this week
So while I wasn’t lying on the couch, munching on junk food and getting my GoT fix, this story about GoT happened: HBO got hacked! Terabytes of data were stolen in a brazen cyber-heist, and the point of entry may have been HBO’s Executive Vice President Legal Affairs Viviane Eisenberg’s account at HBO – her personal and banking passwords were also released as part of the hack suggesting she may have been the original target (or that she was careless enough to store all her passwords as plain text on HBO’s servers).
While the hackers may have been disappointed that they could not get their hands on any unaired GoT footage, they did get script and story overviews for the then unreleased episode 4 of the latest season. They did get unaired episodes of Ballers, Barry, Room 104 and Insecure. All of the stolen content were uploaded online to the website winter-leak.com (a reference to the weather phenomenon that is currently occurring in Westeros), which at the time of writing, has been taken down.
The recent trend has been worrying for Hollywood. The old problem used to be unauthorised leaks, usually via a third-party production or distribution company. Now, it’s brute force hacking that studios and supporting companies have to deal with. Netflix, Disney, and now HBO, have all fallen victim recently, as hacking groups vie for notoriety by trying to get their hands on the “best” stolen content.
So when a couple of days later, news broke that episode 4 of GoT season 7, the one whose script was leaked, was the subject of another leak, this time a much more serious one in which the entire episode was uploaded online. Ironically enough, this new leak was entirely unrelated to the HBO hack, and instead, came via the “old problem” I mentioned above – HBO’s Indian pay TV partner Star India appears to be the source of the leak based on the visible watermark found in the leaked video.
The digital revolution has brought about many positive changes. The ease in which content can now be stolen and shared, is not one of them.
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So I think that was it for the week. That wasn’t all of “it”, I’m sure, and I’ll definitely have more for you next week, and it’s definitely not because I am almost finished binge watching all 6 and a bit seasons of GoT. Nope, definitely not because of that, because I definitely didn’t do that last week instead of work.