There are many people to fear in the criminal world. But no name rings true terror into the hearts of millions quite like Hackerman. Equipped with the power to enhance images and hack into mainframes, he has once again struck. This time though, it’s personal. Last week on March 11th, Toei Animation released a statement informing viewers that their company’s network was accessed by a third party on March 6th. The report stated that several internal systems were damaged and it was going to take some time to repair, however the full scope of the damage is still a bit cloudy and probably will only be known to insiders in Toei. Regardless, they announced that several anime will need to be delayed following this attack including One Piece, Dragon Quest: Adventure of Dai, Digimon Ghost Game, and Delicious Party Precure.

Let’s go down the list in more detail as I know everyone is on the edge of their seat to see when Digimon is coming back. Starting off, One Piece was already on a short break as an event is going on in Japan, the Nagoya Women’s Marathon, and coverage of that put One Piece on a break already and skipped its episode planned for March 13th. However, with this hack they noted that an episode will air on the 20th and at that time they’ll release more information regarding the future of the pirates. Dragon Quest will not air the planned episode 73 and instead will revert back to a rerun of 31 and then release more details later. As for Digimon, they merely said that they’d try and update viewers before the 20th with what lies ahead for the series. Lastly, Delicious Party Precure will air episode 4 again instead of episode 6 in the next installment.

I'm sorry Luffy, but hey at least this gives people time to catch up to episode one thousand.

Essentially, all four of these shows are in a sort of indefinite limbo as we await more details and it’s not currently clear how long it will take for Toei to restore normal scheduling and get things back in order. Everytime I see a major hack like this, I’m dying to know some fucking details. How did it happen, what kind of security vulnerability was exploited? Did John-san forget and leave his fucking password laying around on a sticky note at the local Maku Donaldzu? As someone who studied a bit of security I find it fun to see if a hack could have been easily preventable with a bit more precaution or if Toei found themselves up against Black Hat Harry, The Fat Finger Typer Lv. 99 who knew his shit. Anyway, if I catch wind that Toei released official dates for these anime to return I’ll either update this article or do a new one in case you guys are interested. Are you watching any of these anime? Will this breach cause animation companies to double down on security? Hack into cyberspace, steal some data, get caught (woops), and leave a comment below!