Dark Overlord Hackers: We Punished ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Studio for Talking to FBI (Exclusive)
The Dark Overlord, the hacker group that released the new season of “Orange Is the New Black” a month early, told TheWrap it leaked the Netflix prison series to punish one of its hacking victims for violating a “contract” the hackers imposed forbidding them to go the police.
The hackers stole the episodes from Larson Studios, a family-owned post-production business that works with Netflix, and demanded that Larson follows the terms of an “agreement” written out in the language and format of a legal contract.
Section 4 (c) (ii) of the “agreement,” which refers to the hacking victim as “the Client,” specifies, “If any attempts by the ‘Client’ and/or associated parties of the ‘Client’ are made to defraud this agreement after the understanding of this agreement, thedarkoverlord reserves the right to inflict harm and further adversarial action against by the ‘Client’ and/or associated parties of the ‘Client.'”
“We found Larson Studios was in great delinquency of the agreement after sources confirmed law enforcement cooperation,” the hackers told TheWrap, via an online encrypted messaging service.
The statement to TheWrap seemed to serve a dual purpose for the hackers — giving their justification for releasing the episodes, and to scare off other victims from going to the police.
In a detailed account of the hack in Variety, studio owner Rick Larson said he filed an official police report on the compromised content after Dark Overlord said it possessed dozens of shows from Netflix, ABC, CBS and Disney.