Panera Bread Data Breach Demonstrates Security Worst Practices

Panera Bread executives ignored the warnings from a cyber-security researcher that customer data was exposed on its network until it was forced to deal with the bad publicity of an actual data breach. Imagine someone running in to your office and reporting that the building is on fire. Also imagine that the person is dressed as a firefighter and that there’s a big red truck outside your building with a full firefighting crew. What would you do? If you were executives at Panera Bread, apparently you’d ignore the reports of a fire, but accuse the firefighters of running a scam. That’s essentially what happened when security engineer Dylan Houlihan tried to report to Panera in August 2017 that they were exposing the personal data of millions of their customers.