Hacker pirates threaten to pirate a movie about pirates, reports www.databreachtoday.asia.
The response of anyone whose data is being held for ransom by attackers might best be summed up via words sung by Paul McCartney: "I wanna cry, cry, cry."
Beginning Friday, that's been the scenario facing multiple victims of the WannaCry ransomware, which has reportedly infected more than 200,000 endpoints in over 150 countries.
To the list of the world's shakedown victims, now add Disney, which the Guardian reports is being targeted by extortionists. Their demand: Give us bitcoins, or we'll cut up the forthcoming "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" into pieces and begin posting it online.
Despite the poetic symmetry of online pirates threatening to pirate the fifth installment of a movie about pirates - and in which Paul McCartney makes an appearance as a pirate - Disney's plight is a reminder that any organization remains at risk from shakedown artists.
To be clear, it doesn't appear that Disney's movie was stolen via WannaCry or any other type of ransomware. Instead, it's much more likely that the movie studio or a business partner got hacked.
Cyber extortion comes in many flavors, including: using crypto-locking ransomware such as WannaCry that encrypts devices and demands a cryptocurrency payment to unlock it; threatening to dox firms by releasing sensitive data that's been stolen; or threatening to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against an organization unless it pays up.
Disney, to its credit, has said that it won't surrender even a fraction of a bitcoin to its attackers.
