The fallout of the HBO hack continued on Tuesday as the hackers involved have reportedly released personal phone numbers and even email addresses of multiple Game of Thrones cast members, including Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), and Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister).
They have demanded a ransom running into millions of dollars to prevent any further leaks from the 1.5TB of data that was stolen last week. While the amount of data is nearly seven times that of the 2014 Sony hack, the impact has so far been much less catastrophic.
According to The Guardian, the hackers conveyed their demands in a five-minute video aimed at HBO CEO Richard Plepler, and insisted they would upload unaired episodes of HBO shows and confidential company data within three days if they weren't paid in full.
The video – which mostly consists of white text on a black background – calls for their "six-month salary in bitcoin", which turns out to be around $6 million (roughly Rs. 38.2 crores), given their claim of annual blackmail compensation as $12 million (roughly Rs. 76.5 crores). The hackers claim it took six months to break into HBO's network, which is supposed to justify the ransom.
The phone and email details of Game of Thrones stars were part of a larger 3.4GB data dump, which also include passwords for internal HBO use, draft script for next Sunday's Game of Thrones episode, and a month's worth of emails from HBO film programming VP Leslie Cohen. The Verge adds that the document also contained the home addresses of the above mentioned stars.
In statements to the press, HBO still maintains that "the review to date has not given us a reason to believe that our email system as a whole has been compromised".
Chances are slim that the hackers do have access to unreleased Game of Thrones episodes, which they would have released by now. The fourth episode that did leak two days before airing was part of a separate incident with Star India, which accidentally made an internal copy public before realising its error.
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