Walt Disney is planning to remove Salesforce’s Slack as its workplace collaboration platform following a significant data breach, according to a report by Status media. The decision comes after a hacking group known as NullBulge leaked over a terabyte of sensitive Disney data online, exposing millions of internal communications.
Disney’s CFO, Hugh Johnston, confirmed that most of the entertainment giant’s divisions will stop using Slack later this year. Disney has begun transitioning to other enterprise-wide collaboration tools, though the specifics of the new system remain undisclosed.
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The breach, which came to light in July, involved more than 44 million messages from Disney’s Slack channels. The leaked data included confidential computer code and details on unreleased projects, creating significant security concerns for the company. Walt Disney reported revenue of $23.2 billion for its third quarter ended June 29, 2024. David Bowdich is the Chief Security Officer of Walt Disney.
NullBulge, the group responsible for the hack, is notorious for targeting software supply chains by manipulating code repositories on platforms like GitHub and Hugging Face. Their technique often involves tricking users into downloading malicious files. Disney had announced in August that it was investigating the unauthorized release, but the breach’s scale and its impact on the company’s internal communications systems pushed Disney to make this strategic shift.
Neither Disney nor Slack’s parent company, Salesforce, have responded to requests for comment on the situation. The transition marks a significant change in how Disney handles its internal communications and reflects growing corporate concerns over the security vulnerabilities of third-party collaboration tools.
Salesforce recently said Slack has won new customers such as Citadel, Converge ICT, and GEICO. Its website says 82 of the Fortune 100 now use Slack Connect every week to connect with their customers and their partners. Salesforce’s Slack is used by CapitalOne, Rivian, IBM, OpenAI, Spotify, Box, among others.
In Q2, Slack IA summarized 420 million Slack messages, and customers have built 13,000 AI apps across their organizations in the last 12 months with Slack.
Baburajan Kizhakedath
