Guccifer lifted the Edwardian drama’s grand denouement by hacking the email account of Lord Julian Fellowes, Downton Abbey’s creator.
According to the Smoking Gun, which first reported the breach, the patient zero in all of this was actually an assistant to British magazine editor Tina Brown. Guccifer was able to download her 900-name address book, and from there it was off to the races. Besides Fellowes, the targets included the BBC's Jeremy Paxman, actor Rupert Everett, former UK attorney general Baroness Scotland, Sir Francis Brooke, investment director of Troy Asset Management, comedian Steve Martin and former US ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte. And, he was prepping for an attack on British author Martin Amis.
“I don’t know what near future hold for me,” Guccifer told a reporter at the Smoking Gun, rather cryptically. He’s being pursued actively by FBI investigators for past hacks of top political figures, including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell. So, the hacker said he (or she) was passing along a cache of documents to the website, “in case I disappear.”
He mentioned that he’s having dreams “in which a woman is stepping up to me saying that she is from Federal Bureau and I am busted.” He added, “meanwhile me trying desperately to erase my files on my computer at my desk or on my smartphone which btw I don’t have because I can’t afford one.”
The documents show that Fellowes was hit in May 2013, as Guccifer “copied a variety of correspondence as well as confidential records,” including the Season 4 Downton Abbey closer. Interestingly, Guccifer decided to hang onto the script rather than leak it.
Guccifer’s threat is one of privacy and celebrity embarrassment, of course, rather than any actual mischief, so far. It’s believed that he uses publicly available information to access email accounts by correctly answering security questions.