Disney To Sack Slack After Major Hack

A 1.1TB hack in July has seen Disney move to part ways with the popular office communications tool Slack.

The company said in a memo that most of its businesses would stop using the tool by the end of this year, according to a Wall Street Journal story.

“The company’s Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston announced the planned change in an internal memo this week, saying most of Disney’s businesses would stop using the service later this year,” the newspaper reported.

“Many teams at the company had already started to transition to ‘streamlined enterprise-wide collaboration tools’, said the memo … ‘Where we have opportunities to leverage more integrated tools and platforms we should’.”

Neither Disney nor Slack commented.

The WSJ says the data leaked online included a range of financial and strategy information as well as personally identifiable information of some staff and customers.

The stash included more than 44 million messages from Disney’s Slack, 18,800-plus spreadsheets and at least 13,000 PDFs.

In a blog post anonymous hacking group Nullbulge said it published data from thousands of Slack channels at Disney, including computer code and details about unreleased projects, after gaining entrance through a software development manager’s computer. It has been reported that the hack was a protest against the use of art generated by AI.

“Disney told investors in an August regulatory filing that it was investigating the unauthorised release of over a terabyte of data from one of the communications systems it uses,” the WSJ reported. “The incident wasn’t expected to have a material impact on its operations or financial performance, the filing said.”

In this week’s memo Disney said it was excited about the “alignment and productivity that will be unlocked as we streamline our collaboration platforms”.

Slack is a cloud-based platform that allows people to communicate, collaborate and share photos, documents and videos.

Stolen material viewed by the WSJ included conversations about maintaining Disney’s corporate website, software development, assessments of candidates for employment, programs for emerging leaders within ESPN and photos of employees’ dogs, with data stretching back to at least 2019.

“Disney is investigating this matter,” a spokesman said at the time of the hack.