Pizza Hut’s PR Department Is Seriously Tired of Talking About Data Breach
Update: We spoke to Doug Terfehr this afternoon after he read this post. Doug’s not a bad guy. He’s just having a really rough week at work.
Pizza lovers, check your electronic inbox to make sure you don’t have a note from Pizza Hut.
Pizza Hut has confirmed to other media outlets that customers who placed an online order on Oct. 1 and 2 may have been one of up to 60,000 victims of a “temporary security intrusion” that exposed personal information, including credit card info.
Pizza Hut’s memo to those affected, sent on Oct. 14, noted the breach impacted less than 1% of that week’s visits to the Hut’s website.
The email, images of which can be found on Twitter, specifies Pizza Hut took steps to stop the breach as soon as it discovered the issue and acted to prevent further problems.
“For your security, we encourage you to be especially aware of email, telephone, and postal mail scams asking for any personal information, including sensitive information,” the email reads.
Pizza Hut Is Not Handling This Well
When we reached out to Pizza Hut for confirmation of the breach, here’s what Doug at Pizza Hut said!
I assume you’ve done the research to see that it took nearly six weeks for Equifax to notify customers about their security intrusion? And Yahoo!’s was more than 3 years. Wendy’s, Popeye’s, Chipotle also far longer than 2 weeks like Pizza Hut. We moved very swiftly. Why it takes any company some time to notify customers if that you want to make sure that you are notifying the right companies. That no one is left off or that you aren’t unintentionally alarming a customer who it turns out was not affected. Here’s a good article with more background: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/08/why-it-can-take-so-long-for-companies-to-reveal-their-data-breaches/?utm_term=.bba3f59a2b52
Also, Equifax, for instance, impacted 143MM customers. Pizza Hut was less than 60,000. Just don’t want to cause too much fear given any person who was impacted received an email from the company and a postal letter will arrive soon.
Doug at Pizza Hut is clearly tired of being asked about this situation.
He didn’t provide his last name, but the message appears to be from Doug Terfehr, Pizza Hut’s head of communications. In other news reports, Terfehr provided statements about the privacy and security of customer information being paramount, and apologized for the inconvenience.
Customers who were emailed about the breach can get a free year of credit monitoring from Kroll Information Assurance, according to the email from Pizza Hut.
Lisa Rowan is a senior writer and producer at The Penny Hoarder.
