HBO offers hackers $250,000 to delay payment of demanded ransom

HBO has offered $250,000 as a “goodwill gesture” to hackers who stole TV series episodes and scripts and employee information. HBO would have offered this because the company needs more time to pay millions in ransom in bitcoin.

That writes, among others, The Hollywood Reporter based on a screenshot that the hackers have sent. The image would show an email sent by HBO to the hackers, in which the company offers a bug bounty payment of $250,000 in bitcoin. The HBO executive calls this a ‘goodwill gesture’; the email asks to extend the ransom payment deadline by a week.

The email is said to be an attempt by HBO to buy time so that the company has more time to transfer the ransom in bitcoin. The hackers are reportedly demanding millions of dollars in ransom. It is therefore possible that HBO will respond to the request to pay the ransom. HBO has not responded to requests for comment.

The group, which is said to have obtained a total of 1.5TB of data, put a number of episodes of various HBO series online at the end of July. They also put a number of stolen files online. It would involve 3.4GB of technical data, including an overview of HBO’s internal network and a list of administrator passwords. In addition, the dump contains a number of preliminary scripts from the Game of Thrones series, including the script for an unaired episode. There are also emails in the dump.

Last week, the fourth episode of season seven of Game of Thrones came online early. This was initially associated with the hackers, but later it turned out to be due to a mistake by distribution partner Star India.