What hackers are paying for your Disney+ accounts

On the 12th, amongst the Disney delays, thousands of users had different problems. Their brand new Disney+ accounts got hacked, kind of.

As reported by ZDNet, hackers used leaked emails and passwords to gain access and take control. Reassuringly, these leaked emails and passwords didn’t come from Disney. They came from other sites that had been breached in the past.

The lesson for today: always use a unique password!

The big question here is, why are these accounts being sold — especially at prices ranging from $3 to $11?

If you can’t afford the $7 Disney charges, surely you have better things to do rather than watching hacked Disney+ accounts?

A Disney+ account has value

The value comes from the fact it’s new and on it is The Mandalorian. It’s an in-demand commodity.

People who want these stolen accounts are running streaming and torrenting sites. They make money from illegally distributing Disney+ content. It really is that simple. Why else pay?

This isn’t a problem exclusive to Disney+. Accounts and content from all streaming sources are available online for free. This includes sports, TV shows, and movies from the theater.

It’s an old problem that’s going to get worse because of the division of content across many services.

Hole in the streaming future

For years, executives said piracy takes profits and damages the quality of content. You can’t argue with the first point — piracy does impact profits, but I’ve yet to see where it hinders quality. It’s not like I can blame piracy for shoddy reality TV. It’s made because it’s popular.

Yet, with this era of dispersed content, it’s inevitable piracy will explode. That’s particularly going to be the case as streaming is getting closer to cable prices; that’s if you want everything!

Could this be why Netflix became a behemoth? It conveniently unified content under one very reasonable monthly fee. Since that’s going the way of the dodo, it’s going to be the “Revenge of the Piracy” era.

What sucks is that I believe piracy is one of the reasons we can’t have a real Friends special, or Season 11.