Hacker Says He Stole New Season of ‘Orange Is The New Black', Demands Ransom From Netflix

A hacker claims to have stolen the upcoming fifth season

Orange is the new hack? Netflix is facing a cyber nightmare as a hacker claims to have stolen the upcoming fifth season of its popular prison drama series and is demanding to be paid to keep it off the Internet ahead of its June 9 premiere. The Associated Press reports tonight that a person using the moniker The Dark Lord claims to have uploaded the first Season 5 episode of Orange Is the New Black to an illegal file-sharing service already, though AP said it could not confirm that the file is authentic.

In the ransom note, the hacker claims also to have stolen series from other studios by breaching a single company. The person threatened to release those programs as well if “modest” ransoms are not paid.

 “We are aware of the situation,” Netflix confirmed to Deadline in a statement. “A production vendor used by several major TV studios had its security compromised and the appropriate law enforcement authorities are involved.” 

The streaming service told AP it is an “active situation” that the FBI and others are investigating.

The news about threat to the acclaimed series comes less than two weeks after Netflix posted disappointment Q1 subscriber growth.



Season 5 of Orange Is the New Black takes place in near-real time over the course of three days. In the fourth-season finale, the death of a popular character led to a riot at Litchfield Penitentiary. It ended with another series regular holding a gun to a prison guard’s head. The series has won three consecutive SAG Awards for comedy ensemble and has been Emmy-nominated for both Outstanding Comedy and Outstanding Drama.

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Netflix pushing for the US government to make some data caps illegal

Netflix wants you to be able to stream plenty of TV shows whether you’re at home or on a mobile connection.

In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission last week, Netflix said that the commission should consider banning data caps on wired internet connections and banning "low" data caps on mobile connections.

"Data caps (especially low data caps) and usage based pricing discourage a consumer’s consumption of broadband and may impede the ability of some households to watch internet television in a manner and amount that they would like," Netflix writes.

It argues that data caps on wired internet lines — like the home service provided by Comcast — "do not appear to serve a legitimate purpose." They are an "ineffective" tool for managing network congestion, Netflix writes.

Similarly, Netflix argues, "usage based pricing" — that is, charing by the gigabyte — is meant simply to get more money out of consumers. "Data caps and [usage based pricing] raise the cost of using the connections that consumers have paid for, making it more expensive to watch internet television," it says.

Netflix is concerned about that, but it’s also worried that data caps could soon become widespread on fixed internet lines, too.

The initial cap, Netflix writes, is only enough to meet "the internet television needs of an average American," and that’s if you count out all other web browsing. A higher limit is necessary, it says, for families and 4K streaming.

Netflix’s letter is particularly interesting in light of the FCC’s revamped set-top box plan (which was announced after Netflix’s filing). The plan requires cable companies to build TV streaming apps for their subscribers to use; that’s totally fine on an internet connection without data caps, but on a capped connection, it’d limit how much someone is able to watch. At the same time, if TV and cable providers zero rate their own streams, so that they don't count against data caps, services like Netflix would be put at a huge disadvantage.

The FCC’s set-top box proposal doesn’t touch the issue of data caps at all. "If an issue should emerge, we would monitor possible consumer harm and could address under the general conduct standard of the Open Internet rules," Kim Hart, the FCC’s press secretary, tells The Verge in an email. "We recognize that different pay-TV providers will take different approaches. Some providers have indicated that they will transmit the video over different capacity than that used for internet access."

Access to streaming TV is something the commission is already keeping a close eye on. In approving Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable, the FCC imposed conditions that limited the combined company’s ability to harm streaming services like Netflix. It also banned data caps or usage-based pricing for seven years, out of concern that these would curtail the rise of online TV just as it was getting started. Those restrictions were also enough to scare Comcast into raising its own data caps from 300GB to 1TB.

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