Carhartt data breach exposed information from 12.9 million user accounts
ShinyHunters leaked 12.9 million Carhartt customer records after failed $3.3 million ransom talksData stolen from Databricks platform included names, emails, phone numbers, and addressesGroup now focuses on exfiltration via vishing and SaaS breaches, abandoning encryption
Millions of user records belonging to customers of clothing giant Carhartt has been leaked onto the dark web, exposing people’s names, email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers, to all sorts of scammers and cybercriminals.
The infamous ShinyHunters ransomware gang recently added Carhartt to its data leak site, saying negotiations broke down and uploading the entire archive that was stolen in the breach.
"Millions of records of customer data and vast amount of sensitive information and PII containing employee, customer, customer metadata (royalty info), and other internal corporate data was compromised," the group said.
Compromising analytics platforms
It added that the demand was $3.3 million, which Carhartt turned down:
"After careful review and internal discussions with leadership, we have decided not to move forward with negotiations or further discussions," a company negotiator allegedly told the extortionists.
At the same time, security researcher Troy Hunt from HaveIBeenPwned? analyzed the leaked batch and concluded that it most likely came from Carhartt’s Databricks analytics platform.
Hunt said some 12.9 million accounts were compromised, containing information such as email addresses, names, phone numbers, and physical addresses. The batch also contains "millions of synthetic records that did not relate to real individuals and were excluded from the breach."
ShinyHunters is currently one of the most active threat actors. They started as a typical ransomware group but decided to abandon the encryption part and to focus solely on data exfiltration. The group mostly engages in vishing, tricking victims into trying to log into the corporate environment through spoofed landing pages.
After gaining a foothold, they target for SaaS solutions, through which they steal valuable information. They have claimed responsibility for breaches at hundreds of Salesforce and tens of Snowflake customers.
Carhartt runs roughly 60 stores around the US, and employs some 3,000 people, bringing in an estimated $1.8 billion in annual revenue.
