Disney Chief Bob Iger Doesn't Believe Movie Hack Threat Was Real (hollywoodreporter.com) 27
You may remember Disney's boss revealing that hackers had threatened to leak one of the studio's new films unless it paid a ransom. Bob Iger didn't name the film, but it was thought to be "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales." But now Iger says: "To our knowledge we were not hacked." From a report: Disney chairman-CEO Bob Iger confirmed Thursday that a hacker claiming to have stolen an upcoming Disney movie and demanding a ransom didn't appear to have the goods. "To our knowledge we were not hacked," Iger told Yahoo Finance. "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." Iger continued, "We don't believe that it was real and nothing has happened." On May 15, as first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Iger told ABC employees at a town hall meeting in New York that someone claiming to have stolen an upcoming movie would release the film on the internet unless the company paid a ransom. Iger told staff that the studio wouldn't meet any such demands.
Duh (Score:2)
It was a publicity stunt.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, pretty convenient for a movie called "Pirates of the Caribbean" to be basically hijacked by movie pirates.
I guarantee you they never reported this "hack" to the FBI, lest they face charges for a false report. Still it should be illegal for them to even claim it to the press if they know it's not true (that's fraud at best). A PR stunt that involves falsely claiming a criminal action seriously crosses the line.
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I guarantee you they never reported this "hack" to the FBI, lest they face charges for a false report.
The douche said their investigation showed they haddn't been hacked. Why would they report something they didn't think happened?
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When it was announced they claimed they were working with the FBI. I don't know if they FBI was ever involved or not. (They sure as fuck shouldn't be wasting resources investigating such shit at the behest of corporations.)
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You don't think they would get into a weee bit of trouble for publically fabricating a crime and then falsely claiming the FBI was investigating? They have nothing to gain and a hell of a lot to lose there.
We where NOT hacked! (Score:2)
The election was fair!
Oh wait... Wrong story...
Boy will they be surprised if the movie gets released to WikiLeaks... But who would want to steal this movie anyway.. That Pirates franchise is getting worn as thin as Keira Knightley in the moonlight after taking a coin from the chest. (Yes, I know that's not in the story, but think about it).
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A commercial entertainment film doesn't fit with Wikileak's mission at all. I would completely lose all respect for them if they released it, even if someone did provide it to them. I couldn't think of anything less important in the world.
Sounds like a good bluffing attempt (Score:2)
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Indeed, fake leak-ransom attempts usually pay off, this was an exception.
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Funny stuff.
Overconfident? This bluff call is risky (Score:2)
It's really hard to determine that there is indeed no leak, especially when you have so many companies involved in editing the film. What if the stolen copy wasn't a final cut, e.g. before the final color corrections or whatever the last few tasks are? It could have been stolen from any of the firms Disney uses to do that.
Calling this a bluff is risky. Disney could get egg on their face for it. Or they could be right. Or they could have secretly paid and made this announcement anyway in some kind of
Hacked?! (Score:3)
Brief moment of insanity (Score:1)
Reading this headline, I had a brief moment of giddy insanity - misinterpreting it to mean that Bob Iger had suddenly reversed course and decided that the threat of average users copying movies and fueling piracy is not real. That there is no need for DRM, because the Real Pirates (tm) (not Johnny Depp) will crack and distribute DRM'ed content anyway, so the DRM only serves to hurt honest, paying customers. And that Disney, the leader in immoral copyright extension lobbying and DRM lockdown, would stop it.
A
This is just sad (Score:2)
It would have been *so* trivial for any supposed hacker to have provided proof, in the form of unreleased screencaps or video clips. I'm sorry, but no hacker with the skills to have pulled this off would not have realized that. I agree this seems like it was most likely a publicity stunt.
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There are very few graves that I look forward to pissing on as eagerly as Disney's.
He's been dead for a while now...
Small wonder (Score:3)
That movie sucks so bad, not only moviegoers don't want to pay to see it, even the CEO doesn't want to pay the ransom for it.
Hack was real, just nobody wanted to watch it. (Score:3)