Domino's Pizza India operation says website hacked

The website of Domino's Pizza India was hacked, but customers' information was not compromised, the local franchisee Jubilant FoodWorks said on Wednesday.

Personal information including names, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords and city details from 37,000 accounts was leaked from Domino's website to some blogs and websites by by a little-known Turkish hacker group, according to various reports earlier this week. It isn't clear why the group had targeted Domino's website.

The hack reflects India's continuing problems with online security. In July, 2021 Indian websites were defaced, according to the government's Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). An earlier government estimate stated that a total of 112 government websites in India were hacked from December to February.

Confirming that there was a security breach, Jubilant FoodWorks said it was limited to the "Wow Club" page on the brand website, and the hackers were able to steal some data which was non-commercial in nature. "They had posted the data on few blog sites which we have got blocked now," it added.

The Wow Club gives members access to deals and offers at Domino's. Jubilant, which runs the website as Domino's franchisee for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, has said in its privacy statement that it requests personal information under certain circumstances, including when members want to order online or register with the Wow Club.

Jubilant said its online pizza ordering site is fully secure, and there had not been any data leakage there. "This is a very unfortunate event which has happened despite the security ecosystem that we have created around our online assets," it said in a statement. The company said it had improved its security, monitoring and audits to avoid any such incident in future.

Indian government websites have been frequently hacked, usually by groups that claim to be based in Pakistan. India and Pakistan have a longstanding border dispute. More recently a fledgling branch of Anonymous in the country has attacked Indian government and politicians' websites in protest against alleged Internet censorship in the country, by both hacking and denial-of-service attacks.

Private companies have also been hacked, including Microsoft India's online store. The site was attacked in February by Chinese hackers who said they wanted the company's attention, but Microsoft later cautioned that the hackers may have also compromised customers' financial information. The website was hosted by a third-party service provider.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

• Tweet