Disney to drop Slack after data breach in July: reports

The Walt Disney Company is moving away from Slack for in-house communication after a hack in July that leaked more than 1TB of company files to the public, according to reports.

Hugh Johnston, Disney's chief financial officer, told employees in a memo last week that most of its business units will move away from Slack usage by the end of the next fiscal quarter, CNBC reported.

According to the report, the memo also said the company has begun transitioning to a new, internal "streamlined, enterprise-wide collaboration tool."

The move comes after more than 1TB of Disney's confidential messages and files were leaked to the public in July.

"NullBulge," the group that claimed responsibility for the hack, said the data comes from nearly 10,000 channels of Disney's internal Slack archive.

The leak included unreleased projects, code, images, login credentials, and links to internal websites, and APIs, Wired reported.

Disney previously informed investors in August that the data hack was not expected to have a material impact on the company's operations or financial performance, CNBC reported.

'Rock-solid' Slack security

Responding to the report, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff maintained that Slack's data security is "rock-solid."

"There's no finish line when it comes to security, but companies also have to take the right measures to prepare, prevent phishing attacks, and to lock down their employees from social engineering," Benioff told Bloomberg in an interview last week.

"So we can do our part, but our customers also have to do their part. That's extremely important."

According to Wired's report, NullBulge claimed it obtained access to Disney's data thanks to an insider, who it also exposed. The claim remains unconfirmed, but NullBulge also posted detailed information of the reported insider, including their medical records, personally identifiable information, and the alleged Disney employee's 1Password password manager.