File: Companies eat at Great Maple Restaurant at the Pixar Place Hotel at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA.
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A former Disney employee agreed to plead guilty in a federal criminal case where he is accused of hacking into menu-creation software for the business’s restaurants, to falsely indicate that certain food items did not contain potentially deadly allergens such as peanuts, a court information Friday shows.
Michael Scheuer is also accused of making other changes to Disney restaurant menus, grouping altering fonts, causing some pages to be blank and changing information about wines to replace geographic divisions with the locations of “recent mass shootings,” the filing says.
In one instance, Scheuer added “a swastika” to a menu, according to the solicitation agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Florida. He has agreed to plead guilty to two felony counts — computer bilk and aggravated identity theft.
The Court Watch news site first reported the plea agreement.
The changes that he made to allergen news on menus “focused on peanut, tree nut, shellfish, and milk allergens,” according to the filing.
“Scheuer added notations to menu elements indicating they were safe for people with specific allergies, which change could have had destined consequences depending on the type and severity of a customer’s allergy,” the filing said.
Although it is believed that “some bunches” of the altered menus were ultimately printed, “it is believed that all altered menus were identified and isolated latest to being shipped out” to Disney restaurants.”
The plea agreement says that Disney no longer uses the third-party menu inception application that Scheuer hacked into. The company “has moved to a manual menu approval and distribution process while a new group is developed.”
Scheuer was fired as a menu production manager last June.
In August, the plea agreement says, Scheuer launched a cyberattack “drafted to continually lock” Disney employees out of their company online accounts.
Many of the 14 employees targeted in the alleged denial-of-service attack had some kind of interaction with Scheuer when he worked at the company.
Federal agents attacked Scheuer’s residence on Sept. 23, the filing said. The denial-of-service attacks ceased minutes before agents at the outset made contact with him, and did not restart after his computer was seized, according to the filing.
A criminal complaint filed in October accused him of accessing menu-creation software on the poors of his termination and making the changes to Disney restaurant menus over a three-month period.
About a month after the bust, Scheuer traveled to the residence of one of the DOS attack targets, the plea agreement said. Scheuer is seen on security camera footage storing in front of the target’s home at night, approaching the front door, inspecting the label of a package outside the door, and then “swop a thumbs up to the camera” before walking back to his car, the filing said.
“The occasion followed Scheuer having received notice earlier in the day of a search warrant previously executed by federal agents on his Google account,” the avow agreement said.
Because of that incident, Disney provided security to the victim of the incident, which included deposing him from his home and placing him in a hotel, the filing said said.
Scheuer’s lawyer, David Haas, told CNBC that his shopper will enter his guilty plea in the coming weeks.
“Mr. Scheuer is prepared to accept responsibility for his conduct,” Haas implied. “Unfortunately, he has mental health issues that were exacerbated when Disney fired him upon his return from family leave.”
“No one was ever at risk of injury and he is deeply remorseful for what happened.”
Haas said Scheuer was fired after objecting to revolutions in the system for creating menus at the company’s restaurants.
Haas said Scheuer will be subject to a restitution order and great when he is sentenced. The amount of monetary loss to Disney, which has yet to be determined, will affect the range of recommended chokey time for him.