If you're waiting on upcoming seasons of ABC shows, they may find their way to the public sooner than you thought. The hacker behind the OTINB leak in April is back once again, and this time he has a major network on his mind.
The hacker known as The Dark Overlord shared a small, threatening message on his Twitter account Friday afternoon, naming ABC as the network with the most to fear.
American Broadcasting Company may be up next, ladies and gentlemen.
So what's at risk here? A list of shows obtained by Data Breaches—which they say has since been confirmed by Dark Overlord—included a couple Disney/ABC properties: ABC's The Catch and Disney Channel's Bunk'd, though the former show was canceled by the network in May. It's not immediately clear whether Dark Overlord has obtained more shows from the company in the time since.
In any case, this isn't the first time Dark Overlord has threatened or mentioned the network. Back when he released episodes of a new OITNB season, he released a since-deleted statement that called out several companies by name. ABC, National Geographic, Fox, and IFC were named in a Tweet about what the hacker had access to.
Who is next on the list? FOX, IFC, NAT GEO, and ABC. Oh, what fun we're all going to have. We're not playing any games anymore.
Disney made headlines in mid-May when CEO Bob Iger told reporters the company was being threatened by cyber-criminals, who threatened to leak an upcoming movie if Disney didn't give in to ransom demands. Iger said the whole thing was a hoax, and that the company did not believe they had been hacked.
“To our knowledge we were not hacked,” said Iger. “We had a threat of a hack of a movie being stolen. We decided to take it seriously but not react in the manner in which the person who was threatening us had required.”
The movie in question was believed to be Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, whose release went off without a hitch on May 26. There has been no confirmation of whether or not the same hacker(s) were involved.
Cyber security is an increasingly large factor for companies to consider, and whether or not the threat to ABC ends in a leak, companies should be working to tighten up every stage of the production process to avoid unwanted leaks.
