The new Pirates of the Caribbean movie has apparently fallen into the hands of a different kind of pirate, and they're threatening to make it public unless a ransom is paid. Disney CEO Bob Iger told employees Monday that hackers have seized a Disney movie and are demanding a massive Bitcoin payment, the Guardian reports. Iger, widely believed to have been talking about franchise reboot Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, said the unidentified hackers threatened to release five minutes of the movie online followed by 20-minute chunks until the ransom was paid or the entire movie was leaked. The movie is scheduled for a May 25 release.
Disney has refused to pay the ransom and is working with the FBI, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The latest Orange Is the New Black season was recently released by hackers after Netflix failed to pay a ransom, and analysts say studios can probably expect many more such threats in the year to come. The likes of Disney and Netflix may have efficient security, but you "have all these vendors and small production companies which don’t have great security and probably don’t have the budget to focus on their own security so hackers get in pretty easily," Hector Monsegur, a former hacker who became an FBI informant and director of Security Assessments for Rhino Security Lab, tells Deadline. (More Pirates of the Caribbean stories.)