The personal details of pizza lovers across Australia have been compromised in a cyber attack on Pizza Hut.
The popular fast-food chain, with 251 restaurants across the country, revealed it had been hacked in an email to customers on Wednesday.
“In early September, we became aware of a cyber security incident where an unauthorised third party accessed some of the company’s data,” Pizza Hut chief executive Phil Reed said.
“At this stage, we have confirmed that the data impacted relates to customer record details and online order transactions held on our Pizza Hut Australia customer database.”
The pizza giant said customer names, email addresses, contact numbers and delivery addresses had been accessed.
“If you have a Pizza Hut Australia user account, it also includes unusable masked credit card details and secured one-way encrypted passwords,” Mr Reed added.
“The credit card details we hold cannot be used to make fraudulent payments and all credit card payments are processed securely by an approved payment platform.”
The company said when it became aware of the incident, it took “immediate action” to protect customers by engaging forensic and cyber specialists and launching an investigation to understand what had occurred and identify data that had been impacted.
It is understood the company has reported the breach to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
“It is important to note that there is no evidence that your personal information has been misused and the data we hold cannot by itself by used to commit identity theft or fraud,” the email reads.
Pizza Hut is now warning its customers to be on the lookout for suspicious texts, emails or phone calls.
“Verify communications by confirming the identity of the sender,” the company said.
Australia’s corporate and public sector has been hit by a wave of cyber attacks in recent months, with the personal data of millions extracted by nefarious actors.
In October 2022, cyber criminals stole health data from Medibank, a private health insurer.
In April this year, criminals hacked HWL Ebsworth, a commercial law firm.
The attack compromised the private data of Australian Federal Police officers.