Customers sent rogue message as major fashion retailer caught in apparent hack

Customers of the popular online clothing retailer ASOS have received a mobile alert that appears to threaten the company’s IT department with a data release.

“ASOS HACKED,” the headline of the notification read.

“Dear Asos DPO [data protection officer] and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance,” the push notification said.

Snowflake is a cloud platform that allows companies to host, analyse and manage their data and is used by many major businesses including Canva, the New York Stock Exchange, Disney and OpenAI, according to its website.

A data protection officer is a position in companies tasked with safeguarding customers’ information.

“Engage with us, or we will leak it,” the alert said.

It provided a Telegram link to a channel which then referred to other channels. At the time of writing, they each had only a few hundred subscribers.

The London-headquartered ASOS has more than 17 million customers in more than 150 countries, and made $4.75 billion (£2.5 billion) in revenue last year and an operating loss of almost $403 million (£212 million).

ASOS shares on the London Stock Exchange fell as much as 12 per cent today, down more than $119 (£62) at the time of writing.

UK law requires companies to report any personal data breaches within 72 hours after discovering a breach.

ASOS did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

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