A former Disney employee plead guilty to “hacking” charges related to logging into Disney’s menu software and making changes and was sentenced to 3 years in Federal prison and nearly $690,000 in fines. The hacks included altering allergen information, inserting joke names for dishes and changing some fonts to Wingdings. They employee had access to this software as part of their job, but logged in after he was fired. This appeared to be primarily for printed menus and the errors were caught before the menus were distributed to the park restaurants. Some of it appeared to be humorous like changing “shellfish” to “hellfish”, but changing allergen information has the potential to be life threatening and there was a high profile death related to allergies at a Disney Springs restaurant last year.

Parks may be more vulnerable to cyber attack than we’d like to think. Although the recent case was related to printed menus, most parks use electronic menu boards at quick service restaurants like the one above that could be easily altered. Going beyond that, with admission systems being computerized an issue there could spell disaster with park guests having only a bar code or MagicBand to enter the park rather than paper tickets. It may not even be a hack, but a hardware failure or an error on an update like what happened globally with CrowdStrike in 2024. This global computer issue impacted Universal Studios Japan‘s cash registers at their restaurants, forcing most to close. Technology is great and makes our theme park days better, but hopefully strong security, redundancy and strong policies prevent any issues from impacting theme park safety or operations.