The Whopper of All Vulnerabilities
A Trescudo Threat Teardown
Author: Evangeline Smith, MarCom • September 8, 2025
What the Burger King Hack Teaches Us About API Security
There are security vulnerabilities, and then there are vulnerabilities so fundamentally flawed, so breathtakingly simple, that they belong in a museum of "what not to do." This, friends, is one of those times.
Recently, the digital platform for Burger King—and its sister brands Tim Hortons and Popeyes—was found to have security that one researcher aptly described as being "as solid as a paper Whopper wrapper in the rain."
It turns out, their "Have It Your Way" slogan also applied to their customer data. Attackers didn't need sophisticated tools or a zero-day exploit. They just needed to ask.
The Order: An Account Takeover with a Side of Fries
In the world of fast food, if you want to change your order, you have to prove it's yours. You show a receipt, you talk to the cashier—there's a process.
Apparently, the Burger King digital ecosystem skipped that part.
Researchers discovered a catastrophic vulnerability that allowed them to take over any customer's account without knowing their password. They could change the account's email, name, and password, effectively locking the real user out and gaining full control. Worse still, they could view sensitive data like home addresses and the last four digits of credit card numbers.
The attack wasn't a complex, multi-stage operation. It was the digital equivalent of walking up to the counter and saying, "I'll be taking over the next order that comes up, please," and having the cashier simply say, "Okay."
The Secret Menu: How Did This Happen?
The technical term for this kind of failure is Broken Object Level Authorisation (BOLA), which is a fancy way of saying the system never bothered to check who was asking for the data.
Here's the simplified "secret menu" the attackers used:
They logged into their own account to see how a normal request to change an email address worked.
They noticed that the request included their unique user ID number.
They wondered, "What if we just... change the number?"
So they re-sent the exact same request to change an email address but swapped their own user ID with a different number. And it worked. The system happily changed the email on a complete stranger's account without asking a single question.
It was like a vending machine that would give you any item on any row, just by pressing your usual combination.
Don't Get Flame-Broiled: The Trescudo Takeaway
While it's easy to laugh at the absurdity of this failure, the lesson for every CISO is deadly serious. This wasn't a failure of a firewall or an endpoint agent; it was a fundamental failure in the secure development lifecycle.
Your applications, especially your APIs, are your new perimeter. Here's how you build a defence that's more solid than a wet paper wrapper:
Modern Vulnerability Management is Non-Negotiable: You need a program that doesn't just scan your servers but actively tests the logic of your applications. An API security scanner would have flagged this on day one.
Assume a Zero Trust Mindset for APIs: Every single API request must be authenticated and, crucially, authorised. The system must ask, "Who are you, and are you allowed to do this?" on every single transaction.
Secure Your Supply Chain (Even Your Internal One): This vulnerability was present across multiple brands owned by the same parent company, suggesting a shared, insecure codebase. Your security posture is only as strong as the code you build on.
The Burger King incident is a gift to the cybersecurity community. It's a simple, powerful, and slightly hilarious reminder that sometimes, the biggest threats aren't the most complex ones. They're the simple oversights that leave the front door wide open.
Don't let your security be "Have It Your Way" for attackers. Let's build a defence that holds up, even in the rain.
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