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Kering, the parent company of luxury brands such as Gucci, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, and others, is the latest to fall victim to a ShinyHunters cyberattack.
The group has been on a hacking spree for the last several months, breaching Salesforce systems that provide customer relationship management (CRM) services to several high-profile companies, such as Adidas and Google. Kering is the latest Salesforce client to confirm a breach. Leaked data includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and expenditure data of nearly 7.4 million customers, the BBC reports.
Kering disclosed the breach to relevant authorities and notified all affected customers.
Once the company does so, it is not legally obligated to issue a public statement, the report adds. ShinyHunters, however, shared details about the attack with the BBC over a Telegram chat. The attack was carried out in April, and a ransom demand was made in June, they say. Kering, in response, tells the outlet that it turned down the offer and secured its IT systems.
"In June, we identified that an unauthorized third party gained temporary access to our systems and accessed limited customer data from some of our Houses," a Kering spokesperson said, adding that "no financial information—such as bank account numbers, credit card information, or government-issued identification numbers—was involved in the incident."
In April, similar breaches were also reported at other luxury brands like Cartier and Louis Vuitton.
If you have been notified of such a breach, keep a close eye on your credit statements and be cautious of calls you receive from banks or financial institutions. Since the hackers already have some of your personal information, they may impersonate these institutions and trick you into providing them with sensitive banking details.