Disney Will No Longer Use Slack After the July Breach

• In July, the Walt Disney Company lost over 1TB worth of data, including some very confidential files due to the Slack breach.
• Slack used to be its primary mode of internal communication. But this Thursday, Disney announced that it was ditching the platform,
• It will now be moving on to internal communication tools. The transition will be done by the end of this fiscal quarter.

The Walt Disney Company will no longer be using Slack as its primary internal communication medium. This decision is triggered by the July breach of Slack which leaked over 1TB worth of data from Disney including confidential files, financial information, computer codes, information about upcoming projects, and of course internal messages.

Through an official notice on Thursday by Disney Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston, the company notified its employees that it's moving away from Slack.

The transition to internal streamlined enterprise-wide collaboration tools" is already underway and is expected to conclude by the end of the next fiscal quarter.

What Does Disney & Slack Have to Say About This?

In August, Disney had assured its investors that there was no material impact of the breach on the company's finances or operations.

So this transition seems to be more like a preventive move to ensure nothing of this sort ever happens again.

On the other hand, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce (owner of Slack) said during an interview that its platforms are secure. Companies (like Disney) should also be responsible for protecting their own data and locking down their employees' social engineering to prevent such phishing attacks.

We can do our part, but our customers also have to do their part," he added. Benioff also revealed that Disney continues to use other Salesforce products to this date.

About the Breach

The breach was carried out by a well-known hacktivist group called Nullbulge. While claiming responsibility for the attack, they said that the entire operation was carried out by compromising the account of a single employee.

They didn't share the details of their attack methodology but said that the user had realized someone was trying to break in and they tried to block them. The first time they succeeded but on the second try, the hackers managed to get in.

Speaking of their motive, the group said that Disney was a target because of the way it handles artist contracts, disregards consumers, and its approach toward AI.

They also added that the reason why they didn't try to blackmail Disney for a ransom is because they know how powerful the company is. If it got a whiff of the breach before the leak, it wouldn't take it long to shut down the entire operation.

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