The supposed “Pirates hack” was only ever a hoax, according to Disney chief exec Bob Iger.

Earlier this month the Disney’s boss said that hackers were threatening one of its movies unless it paid a ransom. This film was widely assumed to be Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Hackers had supposedly obtained the film after hacking into Disney’s systems.

But now Iger is saying that there was no hack and therefore no credible leak threat, the BBC reports.

Iger told Yahoo Finance: “To our knowledge we were not hacked.

“We decided to take [the threat] seriously but not react in the manner in which the person who was threatening us had required.

“We don’t believe that it was real and nothing has happened,” he added.

Empty threats by hackers falsely saying that they’d launch a DDoS attack unless marks paid up have happened. It would appear that this form of crime has now been taken up by a group of chancers, possibly inspired by a high profile case earlier this month. 

Earlier this month a hacker called The Dark Overlord demanded a ransom from Netflix amid claims he had stolen the forthcoming season of Orange is the New Black from Larson Studio, a small production vendor in California. The hacker subsequently leaked unreleased episodes of the popular prison drama after Netflix failed to meet demands to pay the hacker tens of thousands of dollars in digital currency.

The hacker claimed at the time he also had unreleased footage from other studios including ABC, Fox, and National Geographic.

Source: The Register