This article was produced with support from WIRED.
On October 20, a hacker who calls themselves Dark X said they logged into a server and stole the personal data of 350 million Hot Topic customers. The following day, Dark X listed the data, including alleged emails, addresses, phone numbers, and partial credit card numbers, for sale on an underground forum. The day after that, Dark X said Hot Topic kicked them out.
Dark X told me that the apparent breach, which is possibly the largest hack of a consumer retailer ever, was partly due to luck. They just happened to get login credentials from a developer who had access to Hot Topic’s crown jewels. To prove it, Dark X sent me the developer’s login credentials for Snowflake, a data warehousing tool which hackers have repeatedly targeted recently. Alon Gal from cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, which first found the link between infostealers and the Hot Topic breach, said he was sent the same set of credentials by the hacker.
The luck part is true. But the claimed Hot Topic hack is also the latest breach directly connected to a sprawling underground industry that has made hacking some of the most important companies in the world child’s play.