Large-scale corporations are prone to hackers. Because of their large size and massive amount of money, they are just large targets for hackers. It’s nothing new. In fact, it’s so common that I’ve written a few blogs on some of the largest online hacks on large corporations. Just recently, HBO, the massively popular premium cable television network, was hacked, and a large amount of data was stolen from the company.
According to reports, last week saw a major hack of HBO’s servers that resulted in over 1terabyte of data being stolen. This data, which included several scripts for unaired episodes of the popular Game of Thrones television show, as well as full, unaired episodes of Ballers and Room 104, has been leaked online. So far, the amount of content that has been leaked to the public has only amounted to 3.5 gigabytes of data. To put that into perspective, there are 1,000 gigabytes in a terabyte. At the moment, no one is entirely sure of what other data the hackers have a hold of, but there is speculation that they have several episodes of Game of Thrones.
And while pirated episodes of Game of Thrones is nothing new, the hackers claim to have accessed much more important information as well. According to a report from The Verge, the hackers have gained access to the phone numbers and addresses of all of the actors from Game of Thrones’ season 7, as well as internal HBO passwords. This makes the situation much more serious, as that information could bring harm upon the actors of the show. While HBO claims that there is little evidence of such personal information being leaked, the threat should still be taken seriously.
The network is conducting an investigation and hopes to avoid a repeat of a similar disaster from 2014 when Sony Pictures’ email servers were hacked. Multiple emails were stolen that damaged the reputation of some executive members of the film studio.
Although large-scale hacks such as these are not necessarily shocking, they are still an unnecessary headache. It is incredibly important that all businesses, large and small, focus a large amount of attention on their security and IT departments. By strengthening their malware and virus protection, they decrease the risk of incidents such as these from potentially ruining the company or the careers of those involved.