GoKawiil
Tech News
French energy company ENGIE disclosed that attackers accessed customer data by breaching a marketing tool used by its business partners for prospecting and promoting energy offers. The company said its internal IT systems were not affected, the incident is limited to customers in France, and stolen data includes names, addresses, phone numbers, contract numbers and metering IDs but no banking details.
A commentary piece contends that businesses often base major decisions on customer insights that are years old, even as they refresh financial forecasts regularly. The author argues this gap between stale customer data and fresh market planning can lead to misaligned strategy.
Asos has confirmed that hackers breached a third-party platform hosting customer communication data, stealing names, home addresses, phone numbers, emails, and profile notes such as search queries. The attackers, identifying themselves as the Xuanye Group, used Asos's own app notification system to alert customers directly, demanding the company engage with them or risk having the stolen data leaked online.
A Threads user discovered that Amazon's account settings include a page of behavioral assumptions based on purchase history, among them a note suggesting she 'has flat buttocks.' The post went viral, prompting other users to check their own Amazon profiles for similarly personal inferences, which can be found under 'Your Shopping preferences' in account settings.
McDonald's is starting a new advertising arm that will sell targeted ads across its drive-thru screens, app and other customer touchpoints, drawing on data collected from its customers. The initiative turns the fast-food chain into a media platform akin to retailers that have built ad networks from shopper data.
Asus disclosed that a breach affected part of its eShop platform, exposing customer contact details and order records, though it says no payment or financial data was compromised. The company has not specified how many customers were affected, which regions were involved, or how long the breach lasted, and says it has contained the incident and is investigating.
Researchers received ethical approval from a major UK retail bank's privacy governance body in August 2024 to study transaction data from women customers, aiming to identify behavioral signatures of financial abuse. The study compared a victim-survivor group against a matched control group, using strict filtering criteria such as account type, age, and transaction frequency to build comparable samples from the bank's 28 million customers.
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes on data centers six months ago. AWS said one of three UAE availability zones and all three Bahrain zones suffered damage beyond what its backup systems could withstand, and it remains unable to restore access to some resources.
CenterPoint Energy has confirmed in an SEC filing that an unauthorized party accessed customer personal information through one of its external-facing systems. The disclosure follows claims from a hacker who says they exfiltrated 7.49 million records—including names, addresses, account numbers, billing details and partial Social Security numbers—by exploiting an unprotected public API lacking rate limiting or firewall defenses.
Trezor has revised the scope of its August data breach, now saying 81,000 customers were affected instead of the roughly 14,000 first reported. The increase stems from logistics partner ShipMonk failing to delete older records as its contract required, exposing details of 67,000 additional U.S. customers who ordered between November 2019 and August 2021.
PepsiCo has deployed its MiNegocio+ app to help small mom-and-pop stores in Mexico City order products at any time, using data insights to recommend items based on local customer demand. This shifts routine ordering tasks to the app, freeing PepsiCo's sales representatives to focus on offering strategic business advice to shop owners.