Adidas Data Breach: 'A Few Million' Online Customers May Have Had Data Stolen

As major corporations collect data on their customers and store them on web servers, hackers will keep trying to get at that data. This week, Adidas became the latest company to suffer a large-scale data breach, joining more than a dozen other corporations with the same problem in the last year and a half.

The clothing and shoe company announced the breach in a press release on its website on Thursday. Adidas said it “became aware” on Tuesday that an unauthorized party got “limited data” related to customers of Adidas’s United States online storefront.

What data did this unauthorized party get, exactly? According to Adidas, their preliminary investigation revealed that the hackers likely got usernames, passwords and contact information.

The company reassured customers that credit card information and fitness data was most likely not included in the breach, but did not go into specifics as to how hackers did not get that information.

The number of customers affected could be as high as a few million, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company said it would alert “relevant consumers” or people whose data might have been acquired by the hack.

“Adidas is committed to the privacy and security of its consumers’ personal data,” the company’s statement read.

At least 15 such breaches have happened to major companies or retailers since the beginning of 2017, according to Business Insider. Sears and Kmart were both affected by the same breach in April of this year, which could have compromised customer credit card information. Even restaurants are not safe as Panera Bread customers had their data stolen the same month.

In 2017, companies like Forever 21 and HBO suffered similar breaches. The scale of such data breaches can be staggering. For example, a 2013 Yahoo hack could have compromised the data of up to three billion people.

Anyone who has purchased items from the online Adidas storefront in the U.S. should probably change their account passwords, just to be safe. Even if Adidas does not personally reach out, it is generally a good idea to change a password anytime a service is compromised.