Disney is calling your bluff, hackers. It was just a handful of days ago that reports indicated that the mega-studio had fallen victim to hackers, who made off with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and decided to hold it for ransom, like a gang of filthy Jack Sparrows. Now, though, Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger wants to clarify something—the hackers never got anything at all. They were just making empty threats.
“To our knowledge, we were not hacked,” Iger told Yahoo Finance on Thursday. “We had a threat of a hack of a movie being stolen. We decided to take it seriously, but not react in the manner in which the person who was threatening us had required.”
He added that the studio does not “believe that it was real," by the way, and “nothing has happened.”
Previous reports indicated that the hackers had stolen the film and asked for an undisclosed sum of money (in Bitcoin, to add insult to injury). If their demands were not met, they said they would slowly leak the movie chunk by chunk online, ultimately releasing the entire film online. Iger first shared the news of the potential threat with Disney employees at an ABC town hall meeting, though he did not say at the time which movie had allegedly been stolen. He also said that Disney would not be paying the ransom, and would join forces with the F.B.I. to find the phony pilferers.
Though this threat may have ultimately been a false alarm, hacking has become increasingly ubiquitous in the film and TV space. In a post-Sony hack era, no studio is safe from the perils of savvy computer masterminds who want to spill secrets, steal content, and potentially collect ransom. However, it seems these thieves should probably look elsewhere for their revenue stream. A group of hackers recently pilfered Season 5 of Orange Is the New Black from Netflix (though it was a third-party vendor with access to the series that was hacked, not Netflix itself). Like Disney, the company decided against paying a ransom, even as the entire season of the popular show was later uploaded online, weeks before its actual release date. Though it’s not indicative of how every studio or streaming platform will react to hacking, this move, coupled with Disney’s refusal to pay a ransom, might make future hackers hesitate before deciding to aim for movies and TV.
