Fired Disney Employee Gets 3 Years in Prison for Hacking and Changing Menus
A former Disney worker has been sentenced to three years in federal prison for hacking into the company’s internal systems and tampering with restaurant menus in ways that could have endangered guests’ health and safety.
Michael Scheuer, a former menu production manager at Disney, pleaded guilty to charges of computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. In addition to his prison term, he has been ordered to pay nearly $690,000 in restitution, the majority of which is owed to Disney.
Scheuer was fired in June 2023 for workplace misconduct but later accessed Disney’s secure servers without authorization. According to court documents, he altered menu content in multiple ways, including changing prices, adding profane language, and manipulating allergen details. In some instances, items that contained peanuts were falsely labeled as peanut-free, posing a potential life-threatening risk to individuals with allergies.
The Department of Justice revealed that Scheuer’s sabotage extended beyond menu content. He changed font settings to Wingdings, a symbolic typeface, which made the menu system unreadable and forced Disney to shut down its Menu Creator application temporarily. Backup systems had to be deployed to restore operations.
In one particularly disturbing move, Scheuer modified wine region descriptions to reference the locations of recent mass shootings. He also disabled multiple employee accounts, launching a bot-powered brute-force attack with over 100,000 login attempts, effectively locking at least 14 employees out of their accounts.
Disney reportedly intercepted and removed the corrupted menus before they could reach any restaurants, preventing direct harm. The company has not commented publicly on the case.
Scheuer’s attorney, David Haas, said his client is remorseful and noted that the sentence imposed was significantly lighter than what prosecutors originally sought.
