Pirated Screener Dump Stops After ‘Security Breach’

[NelsonG]

[img]http://torrentfreak.com/images/security-breach-lock.jpg[/img]Over the past several days more than a dozen high quality screeners of Hollywood films have [url="https://torrentfreak.com/the-hateful-eight-and-the-revenant-leaked-online-151221/"]appeared online[/url], including The Hateful Eight, The Revenant and Steve Jobs.

Devastated Hollywood studios are now working [url="https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-investigates-hollywood-ties-to-pirated-hateful-eight-screener-151223/"]with the FBI[/url] to catch the perpetrators, with some success.

Last week they traced The Hateful Eight leak back to a Hollywood executive and the feds are currently looking into additional leads.

The main targets in this case are individuals connected to the release group Hive-CM8. They’ve released the majority of the DVD screeners that are out at the moment and earlier [url="https://torrentfreak.com/leaked-spectre-screener-completes-hollywoods-ruined-christmas-151225/"]promised to leak[/url] a total of 40.

However, it now appears that their releasing spree has come to an end.

Comments made by an insider on a private torrent site claim that a recent “expose” of a torrent uploader has something to do with it. This information was posted on various sites including KAT and in the TF comment section.

The person responsible for the expose, who uses the screen name Sup3rman, contacted TorrentFreak to provide his side of the story.

After reading [url="https://torrentfreak.com/how-hollywood-caught-the-uks-most-prolific-movie-pirates-151227/"]an article[/url] about how easy it can sometimes be for law enforcement to catch movie pirates, he decided to test this theory on someone who uploaded many Hive-CM8 releases. To do this, he looked at the source of the movie screenshots and found that they were linked to an image sharing account with thousands of images.

All this info was (and is) rather public as the screenshots were posted with the torrent uploads. Also, everyone could see where they were hosted and figure out that the account name in question matched that of the torrent uploader.

However, not everyone close to the release group appreciated the “exposure” and as a result the public Hive-CM8 releases were halted. Hive-CM8 has not commented on the break but on a separate site he wrote that he won’t be available for some time.

On first sight the ‘leaked’ information doesn’t appear to be anything new or particularly private. However, it certainly appears that something spooked the group or uploader into halting the releases.

The reported break is confirmed by the lack of new releases over the past day or two, which is the longest gap since the first DVD screener was posted. Interestingly, however, The Big Short and Anomalisa have been published in private, or ‘internally’ as it’s known.

At the end of the day many questions remain. Could it really be that the exposed image account is the sole reason for stopping the public releases? Or is something else going on behind the scenes?

There’s no point in speculating any further at this point or drawing connections that may be totally irrelevant, but one has to wonder.

Source: [url="https://torrentfreak.com"]TorrentFreak[/url], for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, [url="http://torrentfreak.com/top-popular-torrent-sites-2015-150104/"]torrent sites[/url] and [url="http://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-vpn-service-provider-review-2015-150228/"]ANONYMOUS VPN services[/url].

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