A Santa Clarita resident has agreed to plead guilty to hacking into a Disney employee's computer and downloading confidential data. Ryan Mitchell Kramer, 25, has been charged with one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer. Both charges carry a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison.
Kramer is scheduled to appear in the United States District Court in Los Angeles soon. According to his plea agreement, Kramer distributed a program on platforms such as GitHub that posed as an A.I. art generator but contained malicious software. This allowed unauthorized access to victims’ computers in early 2024.
In April and May 2024, Kramer gained access to a Disney employee's computer and extracted confidential information from the company’s Slack channels. Approximately 1.1 terabytes of data were downloaded from Disney channels. Kramer then contacted the victim, pretending to belong to a fake Russia-based group, and threatened to release the information.
After receiving no response, Kramer released the Disney data and the victim’s personal information on July 12, 2024. The plea agreement also states that Kramer accessed data from other victims who downloaded his malicious file.
The FBI is investigating, with Assistant United States Attorneys Lauren Restrepo and Maxwell Coll prosecuting the case.