Cybercriminals who said they had stolen the digital copy of an unreleased Disney (DIS) movie may have been scammers, as the company believes it was not hacked, CEO Bob Iger said Thursday.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Iger said “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. We don’t believe that it was real and nothing has happened.”
Earlier this month, Iger said hackers had laimed to have acquired a copy of an unreleased Disney film and demanded the studio pay them a ransom in the digital currency bitcoin. If they did not get paid, the hackers threatened to release the film piecemeal in five-minute clips.
Although the movie in question was not identified, speculation swirled that it was either Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales or an incomplete cut of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
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Cybersecurity has become “a front burner issue” for film studios since the Sony Pictures hack, Iger added.
In November 2014, a hacker group believed to have been working with support from North Korea, released a cache of confidential data pilfered from Sony. This included unreleased films as well as information about employees and their families, internal company e-mails and executives’ salary figures.