What went wrong? Foodora hacked!

Half a million customer data was stolen by hackers is being reported by Swedish newspapers. Foodora a Swedish concern is owned by a German business, Delivery Hero. As one can guess by the combination of both names: 1) its about food, and 2) yes, customers book online from whichever is their favourite restaurant and get it delivered.

From what I can gather, the data was stolen from their test environment. This means that live data was stored in test which was not appropriately protected as is required by Art 32 (GDPR). Moreover it seems that the purpose limitation (Art 5.1b) and data minimisation (Art 5.1c) principles were not respected. There is probably more, but this is what I have based on a couple of newspaper articles.

So the affected data subjects are included as customer data was from 2016. The only data stolen in clear text was data which is in main public in Sweden (except if you have a protected identity), so it seems low risk, but read on…

What is not public data is the fact that the individual is a customer of Foodora, and this is a great way to social engineer a phishing attack that seems to come from Foodora to these customers.

On the plus side it looks as though Foodora have got out their communications function, sent a message to all customers warning them on what has happened, and not to click on any links in emails from them. Their quick action is impressive, very transparent, and a good example on how to act when this kind of incident occurs.

Nevertheless, I see that there will be an investigation of Foodora by the Swedish Data Protection Authority, which is scheduled to finish before December 2021.

Image taken from https://www.missethoreca.nl/ restaurant guide.

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