The latest in hacking and bitcoin extortion: Disney's forthcoming Pirates of the Caribbean?

Recently, hackers stole the first ten episodes of the new season of Orange is the New Black from Netflix and demanded a ransom in bitcoin or they'd post the episodes on Pirate Bay. Netflix didn't pay, the hackers were true to their word, the episodes were posted.

Now Disney has been hit. Hackers have demanded a "large" ransom or an unnamed film will be released, the name of the film is unknown but the two big named upcoming releases are the new Cars and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, neither of which am I particularly interested in seeing. Bob Iger, CEO of The Mouse, is refusing to pay and is working with Federal investigators.

What I'm wondering: (A) is this the same same group that hit Netflix, demonstrating some pretty good skills to hit deep in two different megacorps, and (B) is this a new business model for the criminal hacking community? It could certainly be profitable, I wonder if it could also encourage entertainment megacorps to create a consortium to build a big network of bitcoin mining machines so they have a ready supply available if they decide that they need to start paying. Of course, the better solution is to beef up their IT infrastructure and rid themselves of the mindset that it's cheaper to absorb the cost of the occasional hack than to maintain up to date security postures.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-chief-bob-iger-says-hackers-claim-have-stolen-a-disney-movie-1003949

Another star streak photo

I spent another two hours in the cold last night and have one photo to show for it. Fortunately my jacket had my best ski cap and the perfect thin gloves for working with the camera! It didn't work with my phone for reading a book on my phone, so my right hand kinda froze, but I'm willing to sacrifice for my art. :-)

This was shot from the Cloudcroft Trestle overlook facing east, about half an hour or so before moonrise. It's 15 shots of 30 second exposures from a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX7, ISO 800. The camera will do 30 second bursts, unfortunately it does a 30 second 'dark' exposure as part of noise reduction between frames, so the dots are unavoidable and streaks are thus pretty much impossible with this camera. I do like the 16x9 aspect ratio, I kinda wish my Canon did that. Yes, I could mask down to that in Photoshop, but I like composing that way in the first place.

At least now I know.


The glow in the lower left is from cars going in to Cloudcroft - not too much traffic at 1am on a Monday night, the glow in the middle is from the imminent moonrise.

But in other star streak news, Sunday I ordered a Canon intervalometer and a right angle viewfinder eyepiece and they should arrive Friday! So I'll be doing some more experimenting over the weekend.... Unfortunately we're pretty much at the end of this lunar cycle, so while I'll still be doing some star streak photos, I don't know if I'll be able to do much with foreground illumination.