By Rick Hynum
Hackers broke into the IT infrastructure of a global pizza chain based in Russia, potentially capturing the personal information of millions of the brand’s customers. A hacking group that calls itself DataSuckers has claimed responsibility for the cyberattack and revealed possible plans for the stolen data.
Spoiler alert: It’s all about money, the hackers say.
Dodo Pizza announced the breach this week, saying that the potentially compromised info includes customers’ names, physical addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays and order details.
However, the company said customers’ payment data was not accessed in the attack. “We don’t store payment data, so that information is safe,” Dodo stated in a message on Telegram (translated here by ChatGPT). “The attackers’ access has been blocked, and an internal investigation is ongoing.”
According to Telegram posts relaying DataSuckers’ claims, the group said it captured the records of 68 million customers across multiple countries as well as 15 years of order history. It said it will publish some of the data and was willing to sell the database for about $100,000. (Editor’s note: PMQ has not been able to locate DataSuckers’ original Telegram posts and has relied on a report on those posts from a Russian news site and other Russian Telegram channels.)
Dodo Pizza is one of the world’s largest chains with about 1,500 locations in 28 countries. Its Russian business generated about $120 million in revenue this month, according to figures published on its website.
Dodo Pizza founder Fedor Ovchinnikov, pictured above and featured on PMQ’s June-July 2015 cover, has long prided himself on the company’s tech savvy, which he described as integral to the company’s franchise system. That makes the cyberattack even more notable since Dodo’s business model depends so heavily on IT smarts.
Related: Fedor Ovchinnikov of Dodo Pizza Might Be the Steve Jobs of Pizza
“We didn’t just invent another system for pizza store management,” Ovchinnikov told PMQ in 2015. “Dodo Pizza can be considered a cyborg company because we are both an IT company and a pizza company. Our main product is franchises, the core of which is our IT system in SaaS.”
Arguably, however, the more central IT is to a company’s business—ordering, customer accounts, delivery, loyalty, operations, analytics and internal systems—the more problematic a successful hack on its systems can become.
Ovchinnikov stepped down as Dodo Pizza’s CEO in 2024 and as chairman of the board in 2025. But he remains a key shareholder and member of Dodo’s board of directors.
Adding to the bizarre nature of the scheme, someone claiming to speak on behalf of DataSuckers reportedly posted an explanation for the cyberattack on Telegram. Apparently that person is a Dodo fan.
“Dodo is a good company,” wrote the person self-identified as the administrator of DataSuckers’ Telegram account. “And the pizza there is really good. I’m not a Dodo hater or anything like that. But Dodo had one seemingly minor vulnerability that ultimately led to a complete compromise.”
DataSuckers has said it’s motivated by financial gain rather than politics. It used Telegram to publicize a previous cyberattack on Tez Tour, a Russian tour operator, and has invited potential victims, journalists and law-enforcement agents to reach out for comments or samples of the stolen data.
