McDonald’s has recently suffered a serious data breach affecting its employees and customers across three countries. Specifically, the food retailer admitted to having suffered an impact on the data belonging to the US, South Korea, and Taiwan markets.
McDonald’s Suffered Data Breach
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Mcdonald’s has suffered a data breach affecting customers’ and employees’ information.
As revealed, the service recently detected some unauthorized activity on its network that made it investigate the matter. For this, the food retailer hired external consultants who confirmed a data breach.
According to their statement,
While we were able to close off access quickly after identification, our investigation has determined that a small number of files were accessed, some of which contained personal data.
It turned out that the incident affected the company’s marketplaces in the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Specifically, informing the US employees, the company disclosed that the breached details include some business contact information for US employees and franchisees and details about some restaurants. Nonetheless, no precise employee data suffered an impact during this incident.
However, the major impact hit the South Korea and Taiwan markets as the attackers managed to steal customer information. This may include customers’ email addresses, contact numbers, and billing addresses. The attackers also pilfered some employee details for the Taiwan markets, such as names and contact information.
Yet, for all the markets, McDonald’s confirmed that the incident didn’t affect payment information.
Alarmingly, McDonald’s investigations hint that the incident might have affected its markets in other regions as well. Specifically, these may include South Africa and Russia. As WSJ stated in its report,
The company said its divisions would also notify some employees in South Africa and Russia of possible unauthorized access to their information. The investigation had flagged those countries as well.
For now, no further details of the incident are available. Yet, the retailer plainly denied any ransomware attack.
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