As British hospitals and other organisations across 99 countries are still reeling from the global ransomware cyber-attack, Hollywood has also found itself under siege by online extortionists. Disney is currently working with the FBI after hackers threatened to leak their upcoming film, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, unless the studio paid them an enormous amount of money in Bitcoin. Disney has so far refused to pay the hackers, which is understandable – paying these cyber criminals could open a floodgate of attacks and extortion attempts from other hackers.
But will refusing to pay actually dissuade hackers from attempting to blackmail studios in the future?
Hollywood has always been a prime target for hackers. Sometimes hackers leak scripts from acclaimed writers, like when a draft of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight was leaked on Gawker in 2015. Sometimes they target sensitive studio documents, as when internal data and damaging emails from Sony were dumped onto the internet. Sometimes hackers target women in Hollywood, violating their privacy and committing the new, cyber-based form of sexual abuse; hacking and sharing their nude photos.
And of course, hackers sometimes just release entire films. An unfinished version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked in 2009, as was test footage from Deadpool in 2014. During the Sony hack, five unreleased films, including Will Gluck’s remake of Annie, hit illegal file-sharing sites.
Some of these hackers seemed to be doing this for kicks and giggles – but they’re often doing it to get rich. Last month, an anonymous hacker (or hacker collective) known only as ‘thedarklord’ demanded an unspecified amount of money from Netflix, threatening to leak season five of Netflix’s hit show Orange Is The New Black if the ransom wasn’t paid. Netflix refused to negotiate with the extortionists, and the season was leaked online, two months before its slated air date.
A message posted by ‘thedarklord’ after the leak was arrogant and threatening.
“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,” the hacker wrote. “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 hacker concluded the diatribe with an explicit threat to the other networks whose TV shows were allegedly stolen: “And to the others: there’s still time to save yourselves. Our offer(s) are still on the table – for now.”
It’s yet unclear whether the hackers will release Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and how much of an impact such a leak would have on the film’s box office takings. The franchise has pulled in a whopping $3.72 billion in worldwide box office since first launching in 2003. It’s unlikely that leaking the film a few days before its official May 26 release date will result in a financial loss. Disney is thus wise not to be indulging the blackmailers and to focus on helping the FBI in their investigation. A question that is undoubtedly being examined is how exactly the hackers got hold of the film – did they manage to breach Disney’s robust IT security framework, was it a result of human error, or do the hackers have contacts within the studios who are aiding them with in exchange for a cut of the (so far non-existent) ransom money?
A question that also arises is how cyber attacks like these are going to affect the wider film industry, While major studios like Disney can afford not to negotiate with hackers and to take some losses on any films that are leaked, smaller studios and independent filmmakers may not survive such heinous violations.
Perhaps some of the responsibility may thus fall on the film-loving consumer – if we want great television and cinema, we should pay for it. Investigating hackers is obviously vital, but perhaps we should also dismantle the sense of entitlement some cinephiles feel towards their entertainment, and cultivate a culture that respects filmmakers enough not to illegally watch their films for free. Hackers who leak films online are only as powerful as the people who watch the releases, so maybe it’s up to all of us to turn away from screens we don’t have a right to watch.