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Unknown people hacked the world's largest fast food company
Photo: Pichi Chuang / REUTERS
The world's largest fast food company has fallen victim to hackers.
According to McDonald's on Friday, an investigation found that strangers had access to a small number of files, some of which contained personally identifiable information.
According to the company's current knowledge, customer data is only affected in Korea and Taiwan.
McDonald's hired outside specialists to investigate unauthorized activities in an internal security system.
In doing so, secret data access came to light.
According to a report in the "Wall Street Journal", the perpetrators also gained access to data on employees, franchise partners and restaurants of the company in the USA.
This was not about sensitive information, but about the seating capacity and the size of playgrounds, wrote the paper, citing an internal memo from McDonald's.
Business operations have not suffered either.
For once, no ransomware
According to previous knowledge, it is not a ransomware attack, and accordingly there is no ransom demand.
Such attacks, in which files, drives and often backups are encrypted and can only be decrypted again for a ransom, now occur almost every day.
Just a few weeks ago, a ransomware attack halted one of the largest gasoline pipelines in the United States.
The operator Colonial Pipeline paid the extortionists a ransom of $ 4.4 million.
The world's largest meat producer JBS from Brazil was hit by a so-called ransomware attack last week and paid eleven million dollars.
Shortly afterwards, the US government announced that it would give ransomware a similar high priority as the fight against terrorism.
An initial success was that US authorities were able to confiscate part of the ransom money paid by Colonial Pipeline.
pbe / dpa
