Walt Disney is reportedly set to phase out Salesforce-owned Slack as its company-wide collaboration tool following a significant data breach that resulted in over a terabyte of internal data being leaked online. According to the Status media newsletter, which broke the story, Disney’s chief financial officer Hugh Johnston has said that most of the company’s divisions would discontinue using the messaging platform by the end of this year after it emerged that data from thousands of the firm’s Slack channels had been exposed by the hacking group NullBulge.
The breach included computer code and details of unreleased projects, exposing more than 44 million messages. “[S]enior leadership has made the decision to transition away from Slack across the company,” Johnston wrote in an email to staff. “Our technology teams are now managing the transition off Slack by the end of Q1 FY25 for most businesses.”
Johnston added that some more complex use cases may take additional time to transition away from Slack. Even so, the full migration from the messaging platform is expected to be completed by Q2 2025.
Disney unamused by Slack hack
Acquired by Salesforce in 2021, Slack serves as an innovative enterprise communications platform. Earlier this week, Salesforce announced a series of new Slack innovations that would allow institutions to bring their company knowledge, data, agents, apps, and automation into one agent-powered work operating system. The new update will also allow users to deploy AI agents and assistants from partners like Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and more in the same environment in Slack.
Such consolidation was not enough to prevent Disney from ditching the platform after it announced last month that it was investigating the unauthorised release of more than one terabyte of data stored on the platform. The haul reportedly included everything from internal conversations to details on unfinished projects, passwords, usernames and information about internal APIs.
NullBulge, the group behind the attack, is known for exploiting vulnerabilities in software supply chains via platforms like GitHub and Hugging Face, tricking users into downloading malicious files, as noted by cybersecurity firm SentinelOne’s threat intelligence and malware analysis team. The organisation describes itself as a “hacktivist group protecting artists’ rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work.”
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