“Hacktivist” group NullBulge didn’t like that Disney makes use of AI to generate a few of its paintings, so it leaked a whopping 1.1 terabytes of knowledge from the leisure large’s inner Slack archive in July.
Now, Disney says it’s getting rid of Slack.
“I want to share that senior management has made the choice to transition away from Slack throughout the corporate,” Hugh Johnston, Disney’s chief monetary officer, mentioned in an electronic mail to staffers on Wednesday, which was obtained by Standing. “Our expertise groups are actually managing the transition off Slack by the top of Q1 FY25 for many companies.”
Many groups at Disney—which employs about 220,000 individuals—have already began transitioning to different collaboration instruments, in keeping with the memo. By the top of Q1 2025, Disney could have transitioned off Slack, however some “extra complicated use circumstances” might not be accomplished till the top of the following quarter, the memo mentioned.
Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, didn’t reply to Fortune’s request for remark, and neither did its mum or dad firm.
“Knowledge breaches have turn into disturbingly routine, however Disney’s incident is a stark reminder that we’ve entered a brand new period of company vulnerability,” Ameesh Divatia, CEO of cloud data-protection firm Baffle, advised Fortune. “This isn’t nearly leaked buyer emails anymore—it’s potential company espionage on a silver platter. Whereas breaches are frequent, the dimensions and nature of this one set it aside.”
Disney additionally didn’t reply to Fortune’s request for remark about which platform it intends to transition to early subsequent 12 months or precisely what number of of its staff have been affected by the breach.
What’s NullBulge and the way did it hack Disney?
NullBulge, a brand new hactivist group that emerged earlier this 12 months, stole information that allegedly included each message and file from virtually 10,000 inner Disney Slack channels, together with unreleased tasks, code, pictures, login info, and hyperlinks to inner web sites. Lots of the subjects and paperwork mentioned by Disney staff have been confidential, in keeping with The Wall Road Journal, which noticed leaked recordsdata from the corporate’s Slack.
NullBulge claims its focus is on “defending artists’ rights and guaranteeing honest compensation for his or her work.” This has turn into an more and more essential—and hot-button concern—in leisure after back-to-back strikes from staff demanding increased pay and implementing AI-use requirements. In June, a union representing Hollywood movie and tv crews reached a tentative three-year deal with main studios to satisfy these calls for.
Nonetheless, some cybersecurity specialists suppose the hackers’ intentions are fishy.
“Hacktivists are extremely unlikely to run operations of such scale to guard mental property and the rights of artists,” Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb, advised Infosecurity Journal. As an alternative, the group was extra prone to have needed to blackmail Disney or censor sure content material subjects from its library.
It’s arduous to say, nevertheless, precisely why NullBulge was in a position to hack Disney’s Slack channels. Prospects embrace a misconfiguration of their messaging functions, weak safety practices, outdated software program, human error, and different vulnerabilities.
“With bigger corporations, there’s a higher threat for human error as a result of you’ve got a bigger variety of staff who’re accessing your organization information world wide,” Dan Schiappa, chief product officer at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, advised Fortune. “Every certainly one of these individuals and their workstations is a brand new potential threat, making it crucial that organizations have full and clear visibility into their IT atmosphere to catch any vulnerabilities or out-of-the-norm behaviors.”
So ultimately, it could not fully be Slack’s fault in any case, cybersecurity specialists say.
“No single platform is impenetrable,” Divatia mentioned. “Trusting your organization’s secrets and techniques to anybody system is a recipe for catastrophe. The main focus must shift from securing communication channels to defending the info itself, no matter the place it resides or the way it’s transmitted. The foundation of the issue typically lies in how information is managed inside these platforms, not essentially the platforms themselves.”
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