'Aquaman' full movie leaked online in 4K; online pirates may have finally cracked iTunes
The 'Aquaman' 4K leak on Wednesday suggests that streaming encryption on iTunes may have been compromised
A pirated copy of a high definition version of DC movie 'Aquaman' appeared online on Wednesday making it the first ever 4K leak to date. According to reports, the leak is believed to be from iTunes, since the version of the film is 4K and iTunes was the only place where the 4K version of the film was available at the time of the leak.
The title of the file that appeared online suggests that the file was decrypted directly from iTunes indicating that the streaming service's encryption may have been breached. The name of the illegally decrypted file is "Aquaman.2018.2160p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.HDR.HEVC-MOMA".
The leak could easily have been mislabelled and it is too early to come to conclusions regarding its source. However, what must be noted is the fact that the leak appeared online shortly after the film was listed on iTunes for sale. So, for now, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to indicate an iTunes breach.
This leak was received with a lot of cheers as there is a lot of content on iTunes in 4K. 'Aquaman' is not on Netflix and the version on Amazon is not 4K. The only other place where a 4K version is up for sale is on Vudu, but that was shared much after the leak appeared online. If the file is from iTunes, it is unclear how it was downloaded and decrypted.
Following the release of Aquaman, two other 4K WEB-DL films also appeared online. A WEB-DL is a rip created by capturing video from a streaming site. These rips were of 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse' and 'Can You Ever Forgive Me?'
Fans are now hoping that more content that has been released exclusively on iTunes will be made available online.
According to a report on torrentfreak.com, a source was quoted as saying, "Apple has 4k only on Apple TV running tvOS. I assume they skipped checks, if the device is jailbroken, and someone just dumped the encrypted stream and decrypted it via what’s in memory as keys. I’m pretty sure Apple will react fast and block it via updates because they don’t have to keep compatibility with any devices like the iTunes desktop version."
The official Blu-ray release date of Aquaman 4K is slated for March 26 which is expected to include IMAX aspect ratio.
