Skip to main content

Panera Bread’s data leak might affect more than 37 million customers

It’s getting to the point where no matter what kind of business you conduct, there is a very real risk of seeing your personal information leaked to nefarious parties. So far, hackers have gained access to banking, credit reporting, health insurance, email, and seemingly just about every other modern circumstance where your data is saved in a database. The latest: That soup and salad you ordered online at Panera Bread might have cost you some peace of mind.

According to KrebsOnSecurity, the food chain’s website was leaking information for a minimum of eight months, specifically the names, email addresses, physical addresses, birthdays, and last four credit card numbers for customers who placed online orders. The company has more than 2,100 restaurants throughout the U.S. and Canada, and that amounts to a huge number of potentially affected accounts.

Recommended Videos

The leak was first brought to Panera’s attention in August 2, 2017, by security researcher Dylan Houlihan. For whatever reason, the system was only taken offline on Tuesday, April 3, leaving a full eight months during which anyone with the appropriate knowledge could have scraped off the information and used it in a variety of potentially damaging ways. As KrebsOnSecurity indicates, the database’s format is such that customers could be easily searched and identified using any of the data.

As Houlihan put it, “Panera Bread uses sequential integers for account IDs, which means that if your goal is to gather as much information as you can instead about someone, you can simply increment through the accounts and collect as much as you would like, up to and including the entire database.” In Houlihan’s opinion, Panera did nothing to address the issue during the entire eight-month period.

The number of customers affected by the breach is uncertain. While Panera has stated that only 10,000 accounts were compromised and that the company requiring a valid account login to access the information would mitigate the problem, further information indicates that the number of affected customers could number in the millions. In fact, greater than 37 million customers records could be involved.

As always, if you are potentially affected by this data breach, you will want to keep a close eye on all of your credit, banking, and other activity. If you see anything suspicious, then contact the relevant companies immediately. You might also consider investing in an identity theft protection service that can help you keep an eye out for any privacy concerns.

Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has…
Alienware Area 51 gaming PC with RTX 5090, 64GB of RAM is $800 off
Alienware Area 51 gaming PC.

Even if money is no object in your quest to buy the most powerful gaming desktop available, you shouldn't ignore any chance at savings. Check this out: Dell is selling the Alienware Area 51 with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card at $800 off, bringing its price down from $6,100 to $5,300. It's still an expensive machine even after what's already one of the largest discounts in today's gaming PC deals, but it's an offer that you shouldn't miss if you're willing to take the plunge into high-end PC gaming.

Why you should buy the Alienware Area 51 gaming PC

Read more
Amazon is selling this Sansui curved gaming monitor for only $230
A person playing video games on the Sansui ES-G34C5 curved gaming monitor.

You don't have to spend several hundred dollars to get a solid screen for your PC gaming setup. There are affordable monitor deals for gamers on a tight budget. Here's one from Amazon: the Sansui ES-G34C5 curved gaming monitor for only $230, following a 12% discount on its original price of $260. The $30 in savings doesn't look like much, but every dollar saved goes a long way in this hobby, so you should proceed with your purchase quickly to make sure you don't miss it.

Why you should buy the Sansui ES-G34C5 curved gaming monitor

Read more
Microsoft Edge Canary new tab page replaces MSN with Copilot
Microsoft Edge appears on a computer screen with plants and a window in the background.

Microsoft is testing a new Copilot-powered interface in the Canary version of Edge, replacing the MSN feed on the New Tab Page in an attempt to streamline browsing, according to Windows Latest. Users can enable it via experimental flags.

If the new design rolls out to the stable version, Copilot will replace the familiar MSN feed as the first thing you see when you open a new tab. You'll see a compose box in an uncluttered design with a greeting message that asks, "How can I help you today?"

Read more