McDonald’s Data Breach Reinforces “Back Door Strategies” by Hackers

Written on December 11, 2010 – 11:45 pm | by Jasmine Haller

Yesterday, it was announced that McDonalds Corporation experienced a significant data breach where customer data was compromised via a third-party vendor. Basically, the attackers were able to access the sensitive McDonald’s customer data through a couple levels of subcontractors that manage the company’s email marketing campaigns.

A company called Arc Worldwide manages McDonald’s promotional e-mail campaigns — which as you can imagine is very extensive and customer data heavy. Well it turns out that a subcontractor to Arc Worldwide that distributes the actual email campaigns was hacked. So, it was a sub of a sub that was breached. The good news was that no social security numbers or credit card information were stolen.

According to PC World, this is an example of hackers being extra smart and targeting contracting companies that often deal with massive amounts of customer data for their clients (i.e. often major retailers, restaurant chains, etc.). Many see this as hackers going after “low hanging fruit” and targeting more vulnerable sub-contractors.

The big question is…will this cause many marketing companies and other subcontractors that deal with important client data to tighten up their security controls? We would certainly hope so!

Identity Theft Protection Services