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Shop NowWith all the legal trouble the Disney company has had over the decades, one would think they would be a little more cautious. It’s standard procedure when terminating an employee to cancel their login credentials to company computer networks. Somebody didn’t do their job. The disgruntled employee, Michael Scheuer, took full advantage of it. His temper tantrum will lead to serious civil and criminal penalties. The only thing the ex-employee turned hacker can be thankful for is that nobody was killed by his exploit. That could have happened.
Disney menu mayhem
Michael Scheuer once had the title of menu production manager for Disney. He was fired in June for misconduct. If they were going to be that way about it, he decided to show them some real misconduct.
The lawsuit doesn’t name the company involved but Scheuer’s lawyer, David Haas, isn’t afraid to say who’s persecuting his client.
Disney alleges Scheuer “hacked into the company’s servers to alter its restaurant menus, including falsifying allergen information and printing profane language.”
The federal complaint was filed in Florida on October 23. The company “identified and removed all altered menus before they were shipped to restaurants.” It could have been a lot worse.
According to the lawsuit, “Scheuer had access to and used secure internal servers for creating and publishing menus for all of Disney’s restaurants as part of his job at the company.” Disney failed to mitigate the risk by canceling his credentials, the defense counters.
“After being terminated, Scheuer repeatedly hacked into the company’s proprietary software, which creates and distributes menus.” Disney’s parks and properties have a whole bunch of restaurants.
Continued for months
Apparently, Scheuer was allowed to get away with it for quite a while. After being canned, the disgruntled menu designer began “a months-long cyberattack campaign against the company and its employees.”
The allergy info and profanity was only part of his mischief. “Scheuer allegedly hacked into Disney’s menu creation servers multiple times to manipulate and disrupt the menus, such as changing prices and adding profane language.”
Scheuer got really creative. “In July the company conducted an internal investigation and uncovered changes made to its menu creator system that rendered all of the menus unusable.” He changed the font to wingdings.
“This change was so substantial that it caused the Menu Creator system to become inoperable while the font changes were made to all of the menus.” Disney “was forced to take the Menu Creator application offline while they reverted to backups to regain the ability to operate.”
The worst thing he did was alter the food allergy information. That was over the top. Scheuer “then made changes to the menus that ‘threatened public health and safety,‘ the complaint says, including altering allergen information to indicate certain menu items with peanuts were peanut-free, posing a fatal risk to individuals with peanut allergies.”
Disney should have been more understanding before they fired him, his attorney argues. Scheuer has a “mental health disability” that “caused a panic attack at work,” according to Haas. They fired him for it.
