Getting fired is clearly an upsetting experience, and not everybody handles it particularly well. Case in point: a federal criminal complaint accuses one former Disney employee of hacking the software that generated the food and drink menus at the company’s resorts. These attacks even went so far as to dangerously alter allergen information on the menus, the government claims.
The complaint, brought by the Justice Department, says that the former employee, Michael Scheuer, committed a variety of computer crimes after being sacked by the company. The impacted company is unnamed in the complaint, identified merely as “Company A.” However, 404 Media reports that the resort in question is Disney, citing a confirmation from the lawyer representing the former employee. Gizmodo reached out to Disney for comment.
In his role at Disney, Scheuer was “responsible for the creation and publishing of menus for the entire restaurant portfolio,” the complaint claims. The software in question, dubbed Menu Creator, was developed by a third-party for Disney’s exclusive use, 404 reports. Due to his role, Scheuer possessed “intimate knowledge of…[the Menu Creator software’s] system architecture, the menu processing workflow, and potential vulnerabilities within the system.”
Scheuer was fired for “misconduct,” the complaint alleges, and his termination is described as having been “contentious and was not considered to be amicable.”
The attacks on the company took place over a period of three months, during which time Scheuer “manipulated the menus of restaurants owned and operated by” Disney, the complaint states. The more “benign” of these attacks involved defacing various menus by changing their font to Wingdings, thus rendering them incoherent. In other cases, Scheuer allegedly interjected profanity into the menus. The more serious crimes, meanwhile, involved Scheuer’s efforts to manipulate allergen information on the menus. Scheuer is also accused of conducting denial-of-service attacks on the work accounts of several of his former colle