Hackers holding Pirates of the Caribbean 5 to ransom

Just a few weeks ago, a hacker managed to get their hands on the majority of Netflix's fifth season of Orange is the New Black and promptly demanded ransom money to keep it off the web. Now this week, Disney appears to have found itself in a very similar situation, with a different hacker threatening to release Pirates of the Caribbean 5 unless a Bitcoin ransom is paid.

According to a Deadline report, Disney CEO, Bob Iger, confirmed to a group of ABC employees that the company had one of its upcoming films stolen. At this point, the FBI have already launched an investigation to try and find the hacker.

According to TorrentFreak, so far no clips from the film have leaked online. However, the Disney hackers did threaten to release chunks of the movie for each ransom deadline missed. The new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is set to begin showing at Cinemas next week.

KitGuru Says: A situation like this certainly puts a company like Disney in a tricky position. Still I have to wonder, if the movie did leak, would it really have that much of an impact on box office ticket sales? How many people pirating the movie would have gone to the cinema instead?  I've always been of the mind that those pirating movies constantly likely wouldn't be interested in going to the cinema often in the first place but perhaps I'm wrong. 

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