Recent security breach at Domino's Pizza restaurants in France and Belgium has left the restaurant with a black eye, those claiming to be behind the e-heist are demanding that the company's France unit pay €30,000, or roughly $40,700.The group, which calls itself Rex Mundi, Latin for "king of the world," said the information includes full customer names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, delivery instructions and favorite pizza toppings. The data breach involves 592,000 French customers and 58,000 from Belgium.
In 2012, the same group exposed data on thousands of customers after payday lender AmeriCash Advance refused to pay them between $15,000 and $20,000.
If the ransom is not received payment, they say they will publish the data on the Internet.
Domino's told a Dutch newspaper that it would not pay the ransom, and emphasized that credit card numbers and other financial data had not been lost.
However, the release of personal data can still expose consumers to identity theft, particularly if people use the same email and password to identify themselves at other sites.
This isn't the the company's first brush with security problems. In 2012, Domino's Pizza India saw its website compromised.
According to CBSnews, Russian police recently arrested two people accused of electronically locking Apple mobile devices in Australia and in the U.S. and then demanding payment from individuals to release them.
Companies face multiple problems when faced with such extortion threats. Pay up and you run the risk of being seen as an easy target in the future.
Refuse to cooperate and a downed website or release of personal information could have a negative impact on business and customer perceptions.
Online note-taking system Evernote and newsreader Feedly have both been recently attacked. Feedly admitted that the people responsible demanded payment to stop the attacks, although the company said that it refused.
