Luxury fashion group Kering - owner of the prestigiou Gucci, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen brands, amongst others - has confirmed that hackers stole customer data from its systems in June 2025.

Millions of customers of the high-end fashion brands owned by Paris-headquartered Kering could have had their names, dates of birth, phone numbers, and email addresses exposed in the attack, as well as details of how much they were spending in stores.

Fortunately, no personal financial information appears to have been breached.

As DataBreaches reports, the ShinyHunters hacking group claims to have first breached Gucci in 2024, stealing a data set containing 43 million customer records.

A data set of almost 13 million records related to customers of Balenciaga, Brioni, and Alexander McQueen has also ended up in the hands of Shiny Hunters.

The group later claimed it had breached the company by compromising its Salesforce CRM.

Chat logs shared with DataBreaches show that by June 2025, Balenciaga was negotiating a ransom payment with its extortionists, with the luxury goods firm apparently agreeing to pay a ransom of €750,000 worth of Bitcoin at some point.

On June 25, police in Paris announced that they had arrested five people suspected of being high-profile members of underground leak site BreachForums. One of those arrested was described as being known as the leader of ShinyHunters.

At this point in the chat log, a representative of Balenciaga declares that it no longer agrees to pay such a large ransom, and until mid-August the negotiations continued in what some may perceive as the company stringing its extortionists along.

Parent company Kering has now confirmed that some of its brands suffered a data breach, and that "limited" customer data was accessed by an unauthorised third party. It goes on to say that customers and local regulators and law enforcement have been informed of the incident.

It has denied claims that it ever entered negotiations with ShinyHunters.

The obvious concern is that wealthy victims could be targeted through their exposed personal details in follow-up attacks by cybercriminals and fraudsters. Although payment card information was not accessed by the hackers, the fact that email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and purchase histories was exposed creates opportunities for phishing and social engineering attacks.

Fashion lovers who could have had their details fall into the hands of the hackers should be wary of any emails claiming to be from Gucci, Balenciaga, Brioni, Alexander McQueen, or even Kering's security team - especially if they ask recipients to click on a link, download an attachment, or login to confirm their details.

In addition, since phone numbers were part of the breach, the possibility exists for possible SMS phishing attacks and scam calls.