We learned earlier this week that HBO had been hacked, and that the hackers apparently got ahold of some of Game of Thrones scripts. However, it now appears the hack could be much worse than previously imagined.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the FBI is now involved in investigating the hack, and some at HBO believe it could be a whopping seven times bigger than the infamous Sony hack of 2014.
THR contextualized just how big this hack could be.
To put in context the 1.5 terabytes — or 1,500 gigabytes — claim, in the Sony case, about 200 gigabytes of data was released online, a damaging deluge that brought the studio to its knees and led to the ouster of then co-chair Amy Pascal. “A traditional business-grade DSL link would take about two weeks at full blast to exfiltrate that much data,” says Farsight Security CEO Paul Vixie, noting that a finished Blu-ray is about 30 gigabytes. “If not for video and sound, a corporation the size of HBO might fit [entirely] in a terabyte, including all the email and spreadsheets ever written or stored.”
Adds Ajay Arora, CEO of security firm Vera, “The entire Library of Congress is estimated to contain 10 terabytes of print content. As such, it’s hard to believe that video and/or audio are not part of what was stolen. It will be interesting — and terrifying to HBO and their parent, Time Warner — to see what comes out.”
It’s still unclear what the hack could consist of, but all of the possibilities are pretty bad. HBO certainly wouldn’t want unreleased videos out to the world, but just as damaging could be internal company emails, or private customer data.
As hackers become more sophisticated, more giant companies could be targets. And the hauls from those hacking attempts could get even bigger.
