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THR: HBO Hack Is Reportedly 7 Times Larger Than Catastrophic Sony Attack

S

SwordStruck

Member
Using data size as a metric for comparing two breaches is pointless and pretty unprofessional of THR. Especially since we have no idea what file types were even taken. If it was all 4K video files then there's not much there.
 
F

Fergie

Banned
Glass Rebel said:
Is that so?

Somebody get me those juicy Confederate emails.
full
Click to expand...
Indeed.
 
Reptars Revenge

Reptars Revenge

Member
Doesnt have Game of Thrones episodes, this was the decoy sever.

Want to cause real chaos, get all the episodes and just leak the last one.
 
S

Slayven

Member
gdt said:
This is dumb. The Sony hack brought down hellfire because of all the goofy shit in the emails

This hbo one seems to be just videos and episodes. After this season is over, no one will care
Click to expand...

Pretty much, showed how inept, racist, and scummy the execs are.
 
V

Valkyr Junkie

Member
Mimosa97 said:
Mmmh thanks. Is it a common loophole in cybersecurity measures or is it that no one can detect when data is being exfiltered to an outside source if it's done relatively " slow " ?
Click to expand...

Yes and yes. Once an attacker is on the inside and has sufficiently compromised their victim, there's little you can do against data exfilitration since they have numerous channels to get the data out, and most of these channels probably wouldn't have protections in place to alert on something like this regardless of the rate at which data was exfiltrated. If the attacker were to spread the exfilitration out over the course of days or weeks, or to multiple destinations, it would be almost impossible to detect.

There is always going to be a rate that is sufficiently slow enough to slip under the radar and get lost in the noise. There are ways to protect web applications against this kind of thing however, but that's assuming they don't just circumvent those kinds of protections altogether.
 
F

Ferrio

Banned
I'm kicking myself for not going the cyber security route when I was younger. Let's concentrate on coding like everyone else, fuck.
 
R

Random Human

They were trying to grab your prize. They work for the mercenary. The masked man.
Valkyr Junkie said:
Yes and yes. Once an attacker is on the inside and has sufficiently compromised their victim, there's little you can do against data exfilitration since they have numerous channels to get the data out, and most of these channels probably wouldn't have protections in place to alert on something like this regardless of the rate at which data was exfiltrated. If the attacker were to spread the exfilitration out over the course of days or weeks, or to multiple destinations, it would be almost impossible to detect.

There is always going to be a rate that is sufficiently slow enough to slip under the radar and get lost in the noise. There are ways to protect web applications against this kind of thing however, but that's assuming they don't just circumvent those kinds of protections altogether.
Click to expand...

How do these things generally happen? An inside job? Or is it like a malware thing that some employee accidentally messes with?
 
A

Aselith

Member
SwordStruck said:
Using data size as a metric for comparing two breaches is pointless and pretty unprofessional of THR. Especially since we have no idea what file types were even taken. If it was all 4K video files then there's not much there.
Click to expand...

Yeah especially if its a lot of duplicate data. An hour show could be several hundred gigs between different encodes for SD,HD, UHD, alternate language tracks, featurettes and stuff.
 
C

CLEEK

Member
The size of data breaches is typically reported in the number of compromised records. A record can be a file, a user, or piece of data.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/

For initially reporting, stating 1.5TB of data being breached is fine as a representation of the scale to compare it against other similar breaches. If the hack just grabbed a bunch of 4K media of unreleased shows, that's one thing, but if it's internal documents and HBO end-user privacy details, then 1.5TB is huge.
 
J

jfkgoblue

Member
Aselith said:
I would at leas change your cable company log in to be safe. Is it unique?
Click to expand...
Dammit it is fairly unique, but same email as everything else.

Thinking about it, I should be fine, because I don't actually log in with HBO, it redirects to my cable company's site and then they give me permission to use Go.

And isn't Now the same way? You subscribe with Vue/Sling/Apple and they authenticate from there.
 
V

Valkyr Junkie

Member
Random Human said:
How do these things generally happen? An inside job? Or is it like a malware thing that some employee accidentally messes with?
Click to expand...

Yes, typically it would be an employee falling victim to phishing of some kind that causes them to bring malware into the network. Other good possibilities would be shared credentials belonging to an employee that end up as part of an unrelated dump on the web; or a vendor of HBO's that has access to the network gets compromised. Least likely would be a vulnerability on HBO's customer-facing servers that allows an attacker to pull all of this data from them. There's no really telling until we learn all of what was stolen.
 
S

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
I don't really think the units of measurement people use to describe this stuff are valuable. 1.5 terabytes could be an enormous amount of stuff or hardly anything at all, as the article correctly notes. So why not cool it on the hyperbole?
 
H

hodayathink

Member
zeemumu said:
How does HBO have that much data to steal in relation to a movie studio?
Click to expand...

If the people that hacked Sony wanted more video, they probably could have easily taken it. Their stated goal was blackmail, which was why they went for e-mails and corporate stuff instead of their movies or TV shows (they did steal some video from unreleased movies, IIRC).
 
B

Brazil

Living in the shadow of Amaz
This is such a goddamned stupid article. The amount of data stolen simply isn't proportional in any way to how catastrophic a leak is.

A 2MB leak could potentially be armageddon, while a 100TB leak filled with useless files could mean nothing at all.

Pretty pathetic, Hollywood Reporter dude.
 
C

Catalix

And on the sixth day the LORD David Bowie created man and woman in His image. And he saw that it was good. On the seventh day the LORD created videogames so that He might take the bloody day off for once.
On July 30, hackers going by the name of little.finger66
Click to expand...
I shouldn't be surprised.
 
O

Obliterator

Member
cubicle47b said:
The spoilers for season 7 of Game of Thrones have been out for a long time so unless they got season 8 scripts that part of it was pointless.
Click to expand...

I actually think its pretty likely the hacker group has tons of spoilers for Season 8 at this point. There has to have been documents / emails internally discussing it and their plans. Also consider the group refer to themselves as Little Finger it would seem GOT content is likely one of the things they targeted.

I won't be surprised if final season spoilers start showing up soon
 
Soapbox Killer

Soapbox Killer

Grand Nagus
Its time to return to the analog world. You can't download print film and DAT Tapes.


But seriously, I would have though they kept these things offline in some nondescript MIB warehouse.
 
M

Mimosa97

Member
Valkyr Junkie said:
Yes and yes. Once an attacker is on the inside and has sufficiently compromised their victim, there's little you can do against data exfilitration since they have numerous channels to get the data out, and most of these channels probably wouldn't have protections in place to alert on something like this regardless of the rate at which data was exfiltrated. If the attacker were to spread the exfilitration out over the course of days or weeks, or to multiple destinations, it would be almost impossible to detect.

There is always going to be a rate that is sufficiently slow enough to slip under the radar and get lost in the noise. There are ways to protect web applications against this kind of thing however, but that's assuming they don't just circumvent those kinds of protections altogether.
Click to expand...

Wow ... Scary stuff.

So basically if the pirate hadn't disclosed his " accomplishment " HBO might have never known that they had been attacked? Like he could have just kept all the data to himself and never made it public and no one would have known?
 
Sunster

Sunster

Member
can't wait for the internal emails for Confederate saying "guys we gotta rework this thing, it can't be whips and plantations. we gotta go modern"
 
DietRob

DietRob

i've been begging for over 5 years.
I hope it's just video/audio and not new scripts/plans for future shows. HBO always has my favorite shows and I'd rather not be spoiled on shows that don't even exist yet. A hack of data like that would be absolutely devastating for the company.

A season of GOT, Ballers, and other shows currently on the air is bad but livable. Having their show plans leaked for other shittier networks to steal ideas is much worse.
 
V

Valkyr Junkie

Member
Mimosa97 said:
Wow ... Scary stuff.

So basically if the pirate hadn't disclosed his " accomplishment " HBO might have never known that they had been attacked? Like he could have just kept all the data to himself and never made it public and no one would have known?
Click to expand...

That's par for the course when it comes to cyber attacks. The average time to detecting a cyber incident is over 6 months, and the detection most commonly comes from an outside source; like the FBI calling you because they arrested someone for something unrelated and discovered they were in possession of your stolen data/property.
 
C

captjohnboyd

Member
I swore when this was first reported they said it was LESS than the Sony hack (in terms of data size) what changed? Was the initial amount misreported or am I remembering wrong?

Anyway I tend to agree with everyone that the size doesn't matter it's the content. Somehow I have a feeling that the shitshow at Sony won't be matched by HBO. They for the most part seem to be more put together. Minus Confederate lol
 
C

clay_ghost

Member
Mimosa97 said:
Wow ... Scary stuff.

So basically if the pirate hadn't disclosed his " accomplishment " HBO might have never known that they had been attacked? Like he could have just kept all the data to himself and never made it public and no one would have known?
Click to expand...
Most attacks are known 6 to 8 months or even later by the company being compromised. And most of the time, these companies only know when an external organisation inform them.

Basically, not enough budget are allocated to it security when everything is digital now lol.


Edit

Shit too slow.

Valkyr Junkie explained it better but a lot of the time, companies was informed not by the government but by it security vendors hoping to sell their products too.


Edit

Got a Sans SG ad on the page. Lol.
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
Especially if you're talking about high-def video content a few TB isn't much (hell, I've got terabytes of lossless SD home movies and such I transferred from tapes.)

That said, you've still got to actually download all that stuff. Feels like a lapse in info security that an outside third party could do that and nobody noticed.
 
C

captjohnboyd

Member
Also people keep saying room 104 and ballers got leaked but I checked the usual suspects and haven't seen them. I'm not doubting they're out there but this, so far, isn't the big deal it's been made out to be
 
M

MegaManTrigger

Banned
SPE said:
I wonder if this came as retaliation to HBO stating they were going to hunt down and punish people who pirate Game of Thrones? The time frames are tight, but the hack happened a couple of days after HBO went to press about how they're gong to "declare war" and aggressively target people they believe have downloaded GoT.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't this take a long time to plan out and find entryways into HBO servers? I doubt the hack came ASAP after HBO said that about pirating.
 
M

Mimosa97

Member
Valkyr Junkie said:
That's par for the course when it comes to cyber attacks. The average time to detecting a cyber incident is over 6 months, and the detection most commonly comes from an outside source; like the FBI calling you because they arrested someone for something unrelated and discovered they were in possession of your stolen data/property.
Click to expand...

clay_ghost said:
Most attacks are known 6 to 8 months or even later by the company being compromised. And most of the time, these companies only know when an external organisation inform them.

Basically, not enough budget are allocated to it security when everything is digital now lol.


Edit

Shit too slow.

Valkyr Junkie explained it better but a lot of the time, companies was informed not by the government but by it security vendors hoping to sell their products too.


Edit

Got a Sans SG ad on the page. Lol.
Click to expand...

I'm such an ignoramus... Jesus.

Thank you guys for your help. I really appreciate it.
 
T

Temp_User

Member
Are there some HBO email leaks out there regarding the series cancellations of Deadwood and Rome? Or how 'bout some rigged fight results from HBO Boxing?
 
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