Disneyland investigating compromised Facebook and Instagram accounts
Disneyland officials are investigating an incident that occurred on Thursday morning in which the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the theme park were hacked and used to send several offensive messages.
“Disneyland Resort’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were compromised early this morning,” a Disneyland spokesperson told The Record. “We worked quickly to remove the reprehensible content, secure our accounts, and our security teams are conducting an investigation.”
On Thursday morning, a hacker calling themselves “David Do” posted several pictures of a person with expletive-laden messages attached. The attacker claimed to be a “super hacker” and used the n-word as well as the f-word repeatedly in the messages.
The posts were removed within a few hours after the account, which has about 8.4 million followers, was taken down briefly.
Arctic Wolf vice president of strategy Ian McShane said the incident was an illustration of how the motives of some cybercriminals go beyond financial gain and data collection – with many keen to just inflict reputation damage.
“High traffic-high follower accounts will always be a target for threat actors – both sophisticated and the occasional rogue, low-level amateur,” McShane said.
“While the reasons behind the compromise and messages are yet to be fully understood, the widespread shock from Disney's 8.4 million followers should be a lesson to organizations of all sizes that, while social media accounts don't contain their most crucial data, they can still be used to disrupt and harm a company's operations.”
This is the second high-profile social media account to be taken over in recent days. On Monday, the social media accounts for the British Army were compromised and used to promote several cryptocurrency scams.
The breach of the Army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts that occurred earlier today has been resolved and an investigation is underway.
— Ministry of Defence Press Office (@DefenceHQPress) July 3, 2022
The Army takes information security extremely seriously and until their investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further.
Jonathan Greig
is a Breaking News Reporter at Recorded Future News. Jonathan has worked across the globe as a journalist since 2014. Before moving back to New York City, he worked for news outlets in South Africa, Jordan and Cambodia. He previously covered cybersecurity at ZDNet and TechRepublic.