Recently Disney+ users on social media have been saying their accounts are showing unauthorized user profiles. When users are logging into their new Disney+ accounts, they’re finding strange names and new profiles added to the account. Others have reported that their accounts have been hacked, with their contact email and password changed, blocking them from using their own account. Cord Cutters News first reported this last Friday.
Now Disney has given Deadline an official statement on the issue, including claims that Disney+ itself may have been hacked. “We have found no evidence of a security breach,” a Disney spokesperson told Deadline.
So what is happening? According to Disney, “billions of usernames and passwords leaked from previous breaches at other companies, pre-dating the launch of Disney+, are being sold on the web,” Disney said to Deadline. “We continuously audit our security systems and when we find an attempted suspicious login we proactively lock the associated user account and direct the user to select a new password. We have seen a very small percentage of users in this situation and encourage any users who are having these kind of issues to reach out to our customer support so we can help them.”
This has been an issue with other streaming services as well. A quick search of eBay finds many listings for shared Hulu accounts, for example. Hulu does make it easy to monitor the devices linked to an account and remove devices that don’t belong to the user. In Hulu’s Manage Your Account section, there’s a section called Manage Your Devices, where you can see which devices are connected to the account and remove any that look suspicious. Unfortunately, Disney+ does not offer the same feature. So sadly if someone is in your account already, you can’t kick them out.
It looks like account details are being found and sold. It seems that hackers are using email spam messages to warn that your Disney+ account has been locked, or your credit card needs to be updated to trick Disney+ users into handing over their username and password. Once the hackers have the login info, they turn around and sell it online. One other common trick for this is using username and passwords stolen from other sites and trying them on different streaming services to see if they also work there. If they do, they put them up for sale sometimes as cheap as $5 for a year of Disney+.
So if you are worried about this, make sure you change your password to something you do not often use. Also, if someone has gotten into your account, make sure to reach out to Disney+’s customer service for help.
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