HBO Assesses Damage From Cyberattack
Mr. Plepler wrote in the memo that the network was trying to hire an outside firm “to work with our employees to provide credit monitoring.”
HBO acknowledged on Monday that it had been victimized by a cyberattack, after an anonymous hacker boasted about leaking full
episodes of upcoming shows like “Ballers” along with written material from next week’s episode of “Game of Thrones.”
The hacker or hackers claimed to have stolen an estimated 1.5 terabytes of data,
according to Entertainment Weekly, which first reported the breach on Monday.
The hacker said more material would be “coming soon.”
The attack is not expected to have any impact on Time Warner’s deal with AT&T, according to two
people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss private company matters.
Unlike Yahoo, which disclosed last year that hackers had stolen the credentials of hundreds of millions of users in two breaches
that went undetected for years, HBO does not appear to have sensitive personal information on a similar scale.
Much remains unclear about how much information was obtained in the cyberattack, which
can be difficult to determine, said one of the people familiar with the breach.
In a memo to staff, Richard Plepler, the premium cable network’s chief executive, said
that the company did not believe its “email system as a whole has been compromised” but that a forensic review was being conducted.
