LOS ANGELES — The Walt Disney Co.’s early release of its earnings report this month came down to a Dumbo move: The company made the information accessible through an easy-to-guess Web address.
Disney didn’t plan on posting the link on its website until after the market closed Nov. 11. But a reporter at Bloomberg News found it with simple Internet sleuthing and reported results about a half-hour before the scheduled release, according to a person familiar with Bloomberg’s practices, who insisted on anonymity.
“The error is using security by obscurity, as they say, which means hiding the data instead of really securing it,” said Michael Cote, a software- industry analyst with technology-research firm RedMonk. “It’s like putting your valuables under the bed instead of in a safe.”
Six days later, some Bloomberg headline writers in New York found results for data-storage company NetApp and reported them more than an hour before the market closed. The Associated Press
