NEW YORK, June 23 (UPI) -- A claim that a hacker broke into a British publisher's computers to get the ending of the upcoming "Harry Potter" book is being greeted with skepticism.
The hacker, who calls himself Gabriel, posted a spoiler on the Web purporting to reveal the names of two major characters who die in the seventh and final installment in author J.K. Rowling's book series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."
However, computer experts told The New York Times they doubt that computers at the publishers, Bloomsbury, were hacked the way Gabriel claims to have done.
"It's possible, but it requires a decent amount of sophistication to steal something that specific," said Pravir Chandra, a consultant with the Virginia security company Cigital. "If you just carpet-bomb a bunch of employees at a publisher, you're just hoping that one person has what you want."
Lisa Holton, president of the trade and book fairs division of Scholastic, which publishes the Harry Potter books in the United States, would neither confirm nor deny the details in the posting.
She said there are so many spoilers in circulation there's no way to know which, if any, are accurate.