Panera Bread breach report for 8 months, leaked millions of customer records

Panera Bread breach report for 8 months, leaked millions of customer records

Panera Bread’s website leaked millions of customer records in plain text for at least eight months, which is how long the company blew off the issues reported by security researcher Dylan Houlihan.

Houlihan shared copies of email exchanges with Panera Bread CIO John Meister – who at first accused Houlihan of trying to run a scam when he first reported the security vulnerability back in August 2017.

According to Houlihan's post on Medium, as well as one on Pastebin, the Panerabread.com website had an “unauthenticated API endpoint that allows anyone to access the following information about anyone who has ever signed up for an account to order food from Panera Bread: username, first and last name, email address, phone number, birthday, last four digits of saved credit card number, saved home address, social account integration information, saved user food preferences and dietary restrictions.”

Exactly eight months after reporting the issue to Panera Bread, Houlihan turned to KrebsOnSecurity. Krebs spoke to Meister, and the website was briefly taken offline. Less than two hours later, Panera said it had fixed the problem.

The company claimed to take “data security very seriously” and added “following reports today of a potential problem on our website, we suspended the functionality to repair the issue.”

Even worse, within minutes of Krebs publishing the story, Meister also told Fox News, “Our investigation to date indicates that fewer than 10,000 consumers have been potentially affected by this issue.

After some more poking, Hold Security reported to Krebs that Panera didn’t just leak plain text records of 7 million customers; “the vulnerabilities also appear to have extended to Panera’s commercial division, which serves countless catering companies.

You know how upsetting it is when a vulnerability is publicly
disclosed before a company has time to resolve the issue? Yet Panera’s choice to be unresponsive to Houlihan’s disclosure of the security vulnerability is why some researchers won’t play this game and choose to disclose publicly.