A cybercriminal claims to have leaked a large amount of stolen corporate data from Disney. The alleged 1.1 terabytes of data includes a large number of internal Slack messages, which the hackers say were stolen from as many as 10,000 internal messaging channels.
The Wall Street Journal reports A malicious actor calling himself “NullBulge” has claimed responsibility for the hacking episode. It is unclear exactly when the alleged breach occurred, though the contents of the conversations reportedly include “unpublished projects, code, images, login credentials, and links to internal websites and APIs.” Little information is yet available on the specifics of the data that was leaked.
Contacted by Gizmodo, a Disney representative simply said: “Disney is investigating this matter.”
“The attack has only just begun, but we have some good stuff to show you. To show you we mean business, here are two files from the inside,” the hacker group recently posted on its security breach site.
NullBulge describes itself as a “hacktivist group that protects the rights of artists and ensures fair compensation for their work,” Wired writes. The group also says it believes “AI-generated artwork is harmful to the creative industry and should be discouraged” and that it considers any “theft from Patreon, other artist support platforms, or artists in general” to be a “sin.” Whether “Bulge” actually has anything to do with hacktivism or is just a dark web individual posing as a good Samaritan is a question no one can answer.
That said, criticisms that AI companies are stealing from artists are worth examining. Many critics have speculated that AI “is theft” Because of the industry’s business model, which involves collecting insane amounts of proprietary data and then using it to train content-generating algorithms, which can then produce content that, more often than not, closely resembles the work that trained the algorithm. At this point, AI companies have been sued time and again by creatives, many of whom claim their work has been copied. But there has yet to be a decisive legal precedent set by the courts.
Last year, at the height of the AI hype, Disney launched a working group to study how it could integrate artificial intelligence into key areas of its business.
