Uniqlo and GU websites targeted by hackers

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
May 14, 2019

Uniqlo and GU owner Fast Retailing said on Tuesday that hackers could have accessed personal information of around half a million Japanese customers of those two retail brands via their respective webstores.

The Japanese fashion retail giant said that at least 461,000 accounts registered on the sites could have been accessed with the data that was stolen potentially including purchase history, parts of the credit card numbers and other personal information such as names, addresses and phone numbers.

It happened in late April up to May 10 and the company’s investigation is ongoing. Fast Retailing apologised profusely for the security breach but said it has had no reports of third parties being able to use the information so far.

It has taken action to block unauthorised access, improve its security monitoring and has disabled the passwords of affected accounts while asking customers to reset their passwords.

The hack came to light when Fast Retailing received reports from customers that they had received emails of which they had no knowledge. The company investigated, and confirmed that unauthorised logins had been attempted by external parties.

It also issued a warning  to consumers to make sure that they vary their passwords as it looks like the method used for these unauthorised logins was “list type account hacking,” similar to other recent incidents involving internet services. It's likely that the accounts affected were those for which the user had registered the same password with other services.