Disney To Stop Using Salesforce's Slack After Data Breach

Walt Disney Co. said it will no longer use Slack, owned by Salesforce, Inc., for in-house company communication after a data breach leaked company data to the public, reports said citing a company memo.

Disney Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston stated that most of Disney’s business units will move away from Slack usage by the end of next fiscal quarter.

Disney said it had already begun to transition to new internal streamlined enterprise-wide collaboration tools. But, official notification to employees and cast members were issued in the memo.

The decision was taken after more than 1 terabyte of company data reached public following a hack on Slack server. Slack is a cloud-based team communication platform developed by Slack Technologies, owned by Salesforce.

The data hack reportedly included a range of financial information, computer codes and details about unreleased projects. The leaked data consisted of more than 44 million messages, around 18,800 spreadsheet files and 13,000 PDFs.

Following the incident, Disney in August informed its investors that the data breach was not expected to have a material impact on the company’s operations or financial performance.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, during an interview with Bloomberg at its annual Dreamforce conference, had stated that its security is rock-solid, and urged companies also to take the right measure to prevent phishing attacks and to lockdown their employees’ social engineering.

Benioff also noted then that Disney continues to use Salesforce products in Disney store, Disney guides, sales and service operations and its call centers.