Recently a massive attack on Netflix has stunned the entire Hollywood. A hacker, known as "thedarkoverlord", has leaked ten episodes from the upcoming fifth season of the Netflix's hit show Orange Is The New Black (OITNB) and uploaded the same on the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay.
The hacker behind this crime has claimed that apparently, he had asked for an unknown amount of money to Netflix for not leaking the episodes; when the live-streaming services provider denied to give in to his unfair demands, the hacker headed towards The Pirate Bay.
"We are aware of the situation. A production vendor used by several major TV studios had its security compromised and the appropriate law enforcement authorities are involved," said Netflix in a statement.
According to cyber-security expert Itay Glick, CEO of Votiro, "The entrance to that studio could be just like any other ransomware attack – somebody got an email with an innocent looking malicious email, for example a word file containing the cve 2017-0199 exploit as used in many of the latest attacks."
The listing on The Pirate Bay claims that it has ten of the thirteen episodes of the upcoming season of OITNB and the comments on the torrent site prove that the contents are indeed legit and "very watchable."
The download clocks in at 11.46GB with a resolution of 720 x 480 (standard def) and has already attracted thousands of seeders.
Nothing much has been revealed yet about the hacker, but as per Glick, he went the typical way by attacking one of the vendors of Netflix. Usually, that's what attackers look for - "the weakest link" or just an opportunity "to try to reach anyone in the industry, to get their business going."
"The security of a company is the security of all companies that have connection to the company. In such event, this might result in a very low-security measure – very similar to TARGET attack (they got in through the AC vendor)," Glick told International Buisness Times Singapore.
In recent times the number of ransomware attacks has increased alarmingly, thanks to the huge source of hacking-tool available across the Internet. As per a report by IBM, ransomware attacks have shot up an unbelievable 6000% worldwide in 2016 compared with the previous year. In this condition "end users should be very concerned about such attacks", believes Itay Glick.
