A hacking group self-titled The Dark Overlord (TDO) released a torrent file hosted on The Pirate Bay containing nine episodes from the fifth season of the Netflix produced series Orange is the new Black. The leak occurred after the company refused to pay a ransom of 50 bitcoins —
approximately US$ 70k — that the hacking group demanded in order to not disclose the videos.
The first episode of the new season was made available on Saturday (29) by TDO, which taunted the company and their decision not to pay the ransom in a statement posted on the Pastebin website on the same day:
“It didn’t have to be this way, Netflix. You’re going to lose a lot more money in all of this than what our modest offer was. We’re quite ashamed to breathe the same air as you. We figured a pragmatic business such as yourselves would see and understand the benefits of cooperating with a reasonable and merciful entity like ourselves”
The method used to obtain the files remains unknown, but it is clear that the leak is not restricted to Netflix productions.
According to the website Databreaches.net the leak originated from post-production company, Larson Studios, servers in December 2016 and involved “hundreds of gigabytes of non-public media”. The data included files from Netflix and other studios mentioned by TDO in Saturday´s statement:
We’re not quite done yet, though. We’re calling you out: ABC, National Geographic, Fox, IFC, and of course Netflix, still. There’s more Netflix on the feasting menu soon (in addition to the other studios, of course), but we’ll get to that later.
TDO is not a new group. Some of its previous actions include the theft of corporate and employee data from the Gorilla Glue adhesive company and the attempt to sell medical data from 655,000 hospital patients in the United States.
