Disney CEO reports that hackers did not steal Pirates of the Caribbean 5

Earlier this month, reports surfaced that hackers stole Disney’s upcoming film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, threatening to release the film online if a demand for ransom wasn’t met. Speaking to Yahoo Finance, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that the company had not been hacked, and that the threat was a fake.

“To our knowledge we were not hacked,” he said when asked about the role of technology at Disney. “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 described cybersecurity as a “front burner issue” for the company, and that while Disney took the threat of a stolen movie seriously, it declined to pay the ransom that was demanded. At the time, an unknown party demanded “an enormous amount of money,” to be paid in Bitcoin, with the threat that the film would be released online much like Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black was back in April.