Hacker pleads guilty to illegally accessing Disney Slack channels and stealing huge tranche of data

• Hacker pleads guilty to accessing confidential Disney files
• Disney's private Slack channels were breached in the attack
• The leak led Disney to switch from Slack to Microsoft Teams

A Santa Clara man who created an AI image generation tool that deployed hidden malware has pleaded guilty to stealing over 1.1 TB of internal company data after illegally accessing Disney’s internal Slack channels.

The hacker, Ryan Mitchell Kramer, who went by the name “NullBulge” was charged with one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer, the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California reported.

The incident had wide reaching consequences, with Disney choosing to ditch Slack in favour of Microsoft teams following the breach. Over 10,000 Slack channels were involved in the incident, and confidential data including internal communications and ...