JD Sports has always been a hub for sports and fashion, John Wardle and David Makin created the brand in 1983 with the idea of bringing fashionable sports and casual wear to the UK. In 2018 the retail giant took its business to the USA where it continued to thrive, hosting brands like Nike and Adidas, it became one of the cultures go-to destinations for sneakers, rivaling established retailers like Shoe Palace and Footlocker.
Unfortunately, 2023 doesn’t seem to be JD Sports best year, the company has confirmed that it fell victim to a cyber-attack that leaked millions of customers personal data. A spokesperson from the company told Forbes that the number was "approximately 10 million unique customers."
JD Sports notified its customer base via email, the email confirmed that JD Sports was hacked, and as a result hackers were able to gain access to 10 million customers "full names, delivery and billing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and the final 4 digits of their payment cards." JD Sports emphasized that the leak of information only pertains to orders placed between November 2018 and October 2020, so new customers have no need to worry.
JD Sports Fashion Plc spokesperson, confirmed that the affected brands extended beyond JD Sports. It also included JD Sports group brands like Size?, Millets, Blacks, Scotts and MilletSport. They went on state that JD Sports does never, under any circumstance store customers full card details, and the company has no reason to believe account passwords were comprised. Neil Greenhalgh, the chief financial officer of JD Sports, also sent apologies to the customers effected and stressed that "protecting the data of our customers is an absolute priority for JD." He advises customers to be on the look out for scam emails and texts.
The Company claims to be making the necessary immediate steps to investigate and take action against the situation. Security experts warn that even though there was no evidence of passwords being compromised, they should still update them. Security experts are questioning the strange timeline in which the events took place, "In this case, we see historic data has been affected, which raises questions regarding the volume of information being stored and what security is being implemented around it," Muhammad Yahya Patel, a security engineer at Check Point Software, said. "As consumers, we trust retailers to secure our sensitive details. A breach of this size, or indeed any size, erodes that trust, which can be hard to recover,"
As consumers we expect the company’s we do business with to honor our security, when things go wrong its important for brands to address the issues in order to maintain the trust of its clients. In this case JD Sports took responsibility and assured customers that their most important data remained safe. For more information on the story as it develops, and to stay up to date with the latest releases, connect with us on Instagram and Twitter.