Domino's Pizza told to pay €30,000 for its customers' data

Hacker
Someone wants Domino's dough

A hacker group going by the name of Rex Mundi has given Domino's Pizza till 7PM tonight to pay up a ransom of €30,000 (about £24,000, $40,600 or AUD43,300).

Otherwise, it will publish details of more than 650,000 of its customers in France and Belgium, details that include emails and home addresses.

In a statement published on Dpaste.de (and taken down since), it detailed how it managed to get hold of the database; "Earlier this week, we hacked our way into the servers of Domino's Pizza France and Belgium, who happen to share the same vulnerable database. And boy, did we find some juicy stuff in there! We downloaded over 592,000 customer records (including passwords) from French customers and over 58,000 records from Belgian ones."

We're not paying

The group's Twitter account has also been suspended and a senior executive at Domino's Pizza already confirmed that the company wouldn't be paying anyway.

Security company SafeNet commented: "The fact that financial information was not compromised minimises the severity of the breach. But given the increasing number of data breaches we're seeing, it's clear that companies need to start thinking about encrypting more than just financial data. If not they run the risk of losing customers to those competitors that do."

Paying up for ransom can be a tricky business as many believe that it would only embolden the hackers and that there's no reason to believe that, once paid, they would stick to their words.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.