Disneyland’s Facebook, Instagram Account Hacked; Secured Hours Later

Disneyland Resort's Facebook and Instagram accounts were hacked earlier on Thursday with a series of inappropriate posts that were subsequently taken down, Walt Disney Co said.

"We worked quickly to remove the reprehensible content, secure our accounts, and our security teams are conducting an investigation," the entertainment giant said in a statement.

Screenshots of the Instagram posts, which were posted online, contained profane and racist posts made by a person claiming to be a "super hacker here to bring revenge upon Disney land."

Disneyland has about 8.4 million followers on Instagram.

Facebook and Instagram's parent company Meta Platforms Inc did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Recalling the incident in a blog post, The Disney Blog stated that the Disneyland Instagram account was hacked at around 6 AM ET (3.30 PM IST) on Thursday by a hacker, who posted four photos under the name of “David DO.”

These posts threw racist/homophobic slurs and looked to be challenging someone named “Jerome” and some of the “Disney employees.”

The hacker tagged several other accounts. It is yet to be investigated if the accounts belonged to the friends of the hacker.

Disneyland has over 17.2 million followers on its Facebook account, where the hacked posts seem to have been completely removed now.

Meanwhile, China reportedly faced the biggest data hack, where a hacker claimed to have stolen personal data from hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens and is now selling the information online.

A sample of 750,000 entries posted online by the hacker showed citizens' names, mobile phone numbers, national ID numbers, addresses, birthdays, and police reports they had filed.

AFP and cybersecurity experts have verified some of the citizen data in the sample as authentic, but the scope of the entire database is hard to determine.