A cybercriminal claims to have leaked a large tranche of corporate data stolen from Disney. The supposed 1.1 terabyte data haul includes a large number of internal Slack messages, which the hackers claim were stolen from as many as 10,000 internal messaging channels.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a threat actor calling itself “NullBulge” has claimed responsibility for the hacking episode. It’s unclear when the supposed breach occurred, though the contents of the conversations reportedly include “unreleased projects, code, images, login credentials, and links to internal websites and APIs.” Not much information is available yet about the specifics of the data that has been leaked.
When reached for comment by Gizmodo, a Disney representative said merely: “Disney is investigating this matter.”
“The attack has only just started, but we have some good shit. To show we are serious, here is 2 files from inside,” the hacker group recently posted to its breach site.
NullBulge describes itself as a “hacktivist group protecting artists’ rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work,” Wired writes. The group also claims it believes “AI-generated artwork harms the creative industry and should be discouraged” and that it considers any “theft from Patreons, other supportive artist platforms, or artists in general” to be a “sin.” Whether “Bulge” actually has anything to do with hacktivism or is just some random dark web low-life posing as a Good Samaritan is anybody’s guess.
That said, the criticism that artificial intelligence companies are stealing from artists is well worth investigating. Many critics have offered the conjecture that AI “is theft” due to the industry’s business model, which revolves around hoovering up insane amounts of proprietary data and then using that data to train content-generating algorithms, which can then proceed to produce material that, more often than not, looks a lot like the work that trained the algorithm. At this point, AI companies have been sued countless times by creatives, many of whom argue that their work has been ripped off. But there has yet to be a decisive legal precedent set by the courts.
Last year, amidst the heights of AI hype, Disney launched a task force to investigate how it could integrate artificial intelligence into the core areas of its business.
Trending Products
