Neiman Marcus data breach: 31 million email addresses found exposed

A May 2024 data breach disclosed by American luxury retailer and department store chain Neiman Marcus last month has exposed more than 31 million customer email addresses, according to Have I Been Pwned founder Troy Hunt, who analyzed the stolen data.

Hunt's findings come after the company filed a breach notification with the Office of the Maine Attorney General, stating that the breach only impacted 64,472 people.

In a separate incident notification published on its website, Neiman Marcus revealed that the data exposed in the attack included names, contact information (e.g., email and postal addresses, and phone numbers), dates of birth, gift card info, transaction data, partial credit card (without expiration dates or CVVs) and Social Security numbers, and employee identification numbers.

While analyzing the data stolen in the breach, Hunt found 30 million unique email addresses and told BleepingComputer that he also confirmed with multiple people whose data was in the stolen database that the information was legitimate.

"That's obviously a substantial number and I do want to get notifications out to them promptly. The total unique number of addresses I'll be referring to is 31,152,842," Hunt told BleepingComputer.

He said that roughly 105,000 Have I Been Pwned subscribers found in the data set will receive an email informing them of this massive data breach.

When BleepingComputer contacted a Neiman Marcus spokesperson to confirm Hunt's findings, they declined to comment. Instead, they pointed us to the data security notification published on the company's website and said that the 64,472 people mentioned in the Maine filing are those who have received data breach notifications.

Data stolen in Snowflake data theft attack

In June, after it first disclosed the data breach, Neiman Marcus also linked the incident to the Snowflake data theft attacks in a statement to BleepingComputer.

"Neiman Marcus Group (NMG) recently learned that an unauthorized party gained access to a cloud database platform used by NMG that is provided by a third party, Snowflake," the company told BleepingComputer.

The disclosure and the data breach notifications came after a threat actor using the "Sp1d3r" handle put Neiman Marcus' data up for sale on a hacking forum, asking $150,000 for 12 million gift card numbers, 70 million transactions with full customer details, and 6 billion rows of customer shopping records, store information, and employee data.

While the threat actor first said the company refused to pay an extortion demand, it subsequently took down the forum post and the data sample, hinting that the company may have begun negotiating.

A joint investigation by SnowFlake, Mandiant, and CrowdStrike revealed that a financially motivated threat actor tracked as UNC5537 used stolen customer credentials to target at least 165 organizations that failed to configure multi-factor authentication (MFA) protection on their SnowFlake accounts.

Recent breaches linked to these attacks, which started in May 2024, include Ticketmaster, Santander, Pure Storage, QuoteWizard/LendingTree, Advance Auto Parts, and Los Angeles Unified.