The same hacker or group that leaked season five of the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black has now publicly released the first eight episodes of the as-of-yet unaired reality competition Steve Harvey's Funderdome.
"We're following through on our threats as we always do. We firmly believe that honesty and determination are the two most important factors of any business," reads a Pastebin post from the adversary, who goes by the pseudonym The Dark Overlord.
Funderdome, which is set to premiere on June 11 on ABC, features entrepreneurs looking to win funding for their businesses and products by pitching their ideas to a studio audience. According to DataBreaches.net, The Dark Overlord stole these episodes and other titles from third-party production vendor Larson Studios, an audio post-production company.
The adversary had previously threatened via Twitter to dump content from FOX, IFC, National Geographic and ABC, presumably unless these networks paid a ransom fee. It was after Netflix refused to pay The Dark Overlord that the episodes of OITNB were leaked.
Variety, one of the first outlets to cover the latest leak, reported Sunday that it had not yet verified the authenticity of the dump, but it did observe details on The Pirate Bay file-sharing website that would indicate someone had indeed uploaded eight video files of the new Steve Harvey vehicle.
Last May, another actor had threatened to released a purportedly stolen digital copy of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. It now appears that this threat was a bluff. “To our knowledge we were not hacked,” Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger told Yahoo! Finance in late May 2017. “We had a threat of a hack of a movie being stolen. We decided to take it seriously but not react in the manner in which the person who was threatening us had required.”
