Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail faces data breach on its portal

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Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail (ABFRL) is facing a data breach on its portal, and the company is investing the incident. Meanwhile, the company has assured that it will have no operational or business impact on its operations.

The company has engaged forensic security experts to investigate the data breach incident where over 5.4 million email addresses were released online from the portal of the Aditya Birla Group-owned company.

"ABFRL is investigating an information security incident that entailed unauthorised access to its e-commerce database," said an ABFRL spokesperson while confirming the incident.

However, he also added that there has been no operational or business impact. "As a pro-active measure, the company has reset passwords of all customers and enabled OTP based authentication and taken further steps to secure access to customer and employee information," he said.

According to the reports, ABFRL's database has been made public by a hacker group known as ShinyHunters. Cyber security expert Rajshekhar Rajaharia has also shared information on this.

"#ShinyHunters allegedly made public 700 GB of data of #AdityaBirlaFashion including 5.4Mn emails, phone. It seems New Year Data Breaches season started in India. Time to change work email's password," he tweeted.

The database includes personal customer information such as names, phone numbers, addresses, dates of births, order histories, credit card details, and passwords stored as Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5) hashes, the reports added.

The data breach also includes details of employees, including salary details, religion, and marital status.

ABFRL, which had a revenue of Rs 5,181.14 crore in FY21, is the country's largest pure-play fashion powerhouse with an elegant bouquet of leading fashion brands and retail formats.

As of September 30, 2021, the company has a network of 3,264 stores across approximately 26,841 multi-brand outlets. It has a repertoire of leading brands, such as Louis Philippe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly and Peter England, along with India's largest value fashion retail brand Pantaloons.

While its international brand portfolio includes – The Collective, India's largest multi-brand retailer of international brands, Simon Carter and select mono-brands such as Forever 21, American Eagle, Ralph Lauren, Hackett London, Ted Baker and Fred Perry. Last week, it had announced to acquire a 51 per cent majority shareholding in popular and contemporary brand Masaba, promoted by the leading designer Masaba Gupta for a cash consideration of Rs 90 crore.

Additionally, ABFL has also made a foray into branded ethnic wear through the acquisition of the Jaypore brand and partnerships with India's leading designers Shantanu and Nikhil, Tarun Tahiliani and Sabyasachi.