Recently fast food chain giant McDonald asked its customers to update its app to prevent any unnecessary cyber security breaches.
What is the issue?
It further said that the app doesn’t store sensitive financial information of its users, and that it is safe to use.
The statement from the food chain giant came after a blog post by cyber security start-up Fallible, which had noted that the McDonald’s app is leaking personal data for more than 2.2 million of its users.
The leakage includes name, email address, phone number, home address, accurate home co-ordinates and social profile links.
What are the reasons to worry?
In India, there is a relative silence when it comes to public acceptance of cyber breaches by individual companies.
India ranked fourth among countries most targeted for Web application attacks, in a report by content delivery network services provider.
Juxtapose this with the fact that India has been adding millions of Internet users every year, along with the fast entry of Indian into the world of digital money.
Fallible in an earlier post had called the security of Indian payments infrastructure ‘a joke’.
It said that vulnerabilities in major payment gateways and wallets include multiple ways of data leak, monetary loss, private keys leak and more.
What is the way forward?
Making breaches public should be mandatory and is the wake-up call company’s need.
It would then become a customer-facing issue, and the management will be all ears.
The more proactive ones will also realise that good cyber security can be good marketing.
