DISNEY+ HACKING Allegations Alarms SOCIAL MEDIA Despite Explanation, Reassurances from Disney

There is likely no doubt that Disney+, the exclusive streaming video-on-demand service of the House of Mouse, offering a massive combined library of films, animations and TV shows Disney, “Star Wars,” Marvel and more, is the hottest online binge-watching platform in the internet today. Its November 12 release saw 10 million subscribers for that day alone, and it has grown since despite a number of issues that have somewhat kept the whole Disney+ experience from being perfect. There are some series with missing episodes or catalogued out of chronological order, and the aspect ratio issues of old shows like early seasons of “The Simpsons.” Then there are the hacking allegations.

USA Today reports that Twitter has been on another social media storm, abuzz with discussions and allegations that the Disney+ SVOD platform has been hacked. Such a situation has been cited as the cause of the service’s various system hiccups, including the inability of some new subscribers to sign up, according to a report from the tech news site ZDNet. Disney itself has responded that they have caught no evidence of hacking on Disney+, although they did assure active and would-be subscribers that they take user data and privacy on the streaming platform very seriously.

But ZDNet’s report does note that is has spotted quite a number of Disney+ accounts that are now being sold by hackers on websites at the “Dark Net,” the seedy underbelly of the internet. Here, purported Disney+ accounts, which normally cost $7 monthly, are going for an average pirated price-tag of $3 since the service’s launch day. The House of Mouse however insists that Disney+ has not been breached, though it did offer a reasonable explanation for subscribers having access troubles and even getting their accounts locked for some reason.

Apparently the sign-in problems on Disney+ are likely the result of oversights on the part of subscribers regarding general online security. This lies in the lazy practice of internet service subscribers who use the same passwords across all service accounts they have requiring logons. Disney internet servers have a system that tracks password combination similarities across its various different sites. So when a registered Disney site member tries to, say, open a Disney+ account and carry over his site password there, the servers react by locking the account, then alerting the subscriber to change passwords.

While this explanation is markedly reasonable when it comes to the incidents of Disney+ sign-in difficulties, the matter of the alleged accounts for sale on the Dark Net remains unresolved. This however has not stopped Disney+ from continuing to become a big thing in streaming. The service is already open in the US, Canada and the Netherlands, and will expand to Australia, New Zealand and Puerto Rico this Tuesday, November 19. More countries will gain subscription access by next year.

Image courtesy of ZDNet