The people responsible for posting more than a dozen leaked DVD-screeners over the past several days have stopped their dump. Various sources cite a security breach as the reason for the sudden change, which likely means that many of the 40 promised leaks might never reach the public at large.

Over the past several days more than a dozen high quality screeners of Hollywood films have appeared online, including The Hateful Eight, The Revenant and Steve Jobs.

Devastated Hollywood studios are now working with the FBI 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 promised to leak 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 an article 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 torrentfreak.com

Hive-CM8 responded:

Notes:

DVDScreener 15

we held back this title till 1 week after cinema premiere to give the movie a fighting chance to play in the budget, we learned from our mistake

Statement:

We didnt plan to comment at all on recent events, but we feel now that we should

Sorry to disappoint M but there was no hack or any such thing . we got the copies sold from a guy on the street, no decryption was needed. we were definately not the only ones
cpl other movies have been on the net days before, not done from us
So we wanted to share this movies with the people who are not rich enough or not able to watch all nominated movies in the cinema

Of course this files are not representing the movies how they can be enjoyed in the cinema

As said in our nfo, please support the producers and watch all movies in the cinema on a big screen, like you should do anyhow
The Producers need the money from ticket sales to get back the production costs

As for Hateful Eight Movie:

We feel sorry for the trouble we caused by releasing that great movie before cinedate even has begun
we never intended to hurt anyone by doing that, we didnt know it would get that popular that quickly

The Hateful Eight is an excellent,thrilling and entertaining Western that combines terrific direction,a fantastic cast,a wonderful script,beautiful photography and a memorable score
All of those elements make The Hateful Eight an unforgettable film that is Quentin Tarantino at his best

Since everyone is now talking about this movie we dont think the producers will loose any money at cinedate, and we tell you now why
we actually think this has created a new type of media hype that is more present in the news,radio and in the papers than starwars, and the promotional costs for this were free

If lets say 5% of the people planned to watch this movie at cinemadate, due to this media push we unintenionally created, we believe that now 40% of the people will watch this movie in the cinema
cause everyone is talking about it and everyone wants to see the movie that created so much noise
this will push the cinema tickets sale for sure

we really hope this helped out the producers in the longrun, so that the production costs are covered and more

we also think that the hateful 8 movie is the top candidate for the awards and will win by a mile over others
thx tarantino for this wonderful movie

sorry it was around christmas we didnt plan that at all either, we wont do another movie before its cinedate
and we def wont go up to 40 as planned, we think we have done enough already

cheers