Shares in British clothing company ASOS dive after hackers apparently send push notification

What happened

Charlotte Wilson, an executive at cybersecurity company Check Point, said: “If confirmed, this is a deeply serious attack because the hackers appear to have done something particularly brazen: turned ASOS’s own app into their ransom note.” Several mysteries surround what appeared to be an unauthorized push notification sent to customers of London-based clothing company ASOS.

The notification linked to a Telegram channel calling itself Xuanye Group, a name not previously seen by experts who track cyber extortion groups. Such groups typically contact companies privately before publishing stolen data or publicly claiming responsibility for a breach.

The people behind the message provided no evidence that they had compromised ASOS’s Snowflake cloud data environment. She said that the rapid way ASOS shares tumbled after the alert was sent showed how “before the company had even publicly established what had happened, investors were already pricing in the potential consequences.”

ASOS, which is traded on the London Stock Exchange, did not respond to a request for comment. A later post said: “Regarding ASOS, payment information is not affected.”