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Disney Chief Bob Iger Doesn't Believe Movie Hack Threat Was Real (hollywoodreporter.com)
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.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Most movie piracy was from DVD/Blu-ray screeners given out to critics or friends/family. Unless Iger's thought that he was going to try to defray the poor ticket sales of Pirates on it. "It didn't do well at the boxoffice because everybody PIRATED it" (pun intended) I wonder if the FBI got serious about investigating it and he had to walk back his statement...
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.
You can't ransom something nobody wants.
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