Club Penguin fans have reportedly staged a digital heist, hacking a Disney Confluence server for information on the now-defunct game coming away with 2.5GB of internal Disney data.
According to BleepingComputer, an anonymous user uploaded a link to ‘Internal Club Penguin PDFs’ on 4chan alongside the caption, “I no longer need these :).” The link directs to a 415MB archive with 137 PDFs, which include old internal info on Club Penguin such as design schematics, emails, and character sheets.
One sighted character sheet delves into MMO character Sensei, including his biography and character reactions, and is likely mostly valuable to fans and lost media enthusiasts. The servers were reportedly breached using previously exposed credentials.
It’s worth noting that Disney-owned MMO Club Penguin was officially shut down seven years ago in 2017, with Club Penguin Island closing down in 2018, so this internal info is all at least six or seven years old. Many players continue to get their penguin fix via private servers, but there’s been multiple community pushes to bring it back – including the Rewritten fan game, which had 11 million registered users prior to being shut down in 2022, and saw three operators arrested.
While the revealed data isn’t exactly smoking gun-level spicy, the internal Club Penguin info isn’t the only thing the hackers made off with. According to BleepingComputer and its anonymous sources, internal Disney data including corporate strategies, developers tools, infrastructure and advertising plans were also downloaded as part of the Disney Confluence server hack. Some of this data, which BleepingComputer has sighted, appears to contain information from as recently as 2024.
Alongside this information, the hack also included documents with links to multiple internal websites used by Disney developers, which could be valuable for others wishing to target the company.
While unfortunately, Club Penguin doesn’t appear to be making a public (and legal) comeback any time soon, it’s clearly not stopping mega fans of the MMO from trying their hardest. Waddle on, gamers.
Image: Sutthichai Supapornpasupad via Getty Images / Club Penguin / Kotaku Australia
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