Asos hackers duped employee in data breach

Afternoon all,

There’s been a fresh development in the Asos hack saga, after the fast-fashion group revealed that the hackers behind a threat to leak Asos customer data duped an employee by posing as a “trusted contact”. An investigation is underway as to how the alarming push notification ended up going out on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the founder of collapsed shadow bank MFS has accused administrators of “internecine warfare” and harassment as the firm’s creditors fight to unlock billions of pounds in frozen funds, City AM can reveal. 

PLUS: The Capitalist column gets stuck into the gossip from a packed party conference season, from the main stage to the dancefloor…

We’ll be back in your inboxes at 8am tomorrow. In the meantime, have a great Thursday evening!

Matt

An unknown group shocked Asos’ millions of customers on Tuesday when they published a push notification on the online retailer’s app, claiming to have hacked into the company and threatening a data leak.

The incident triggered an immediate sell-off of the London-listed group, as its shares fell more than 13 per cent, casting doubt on the company’s ability to continue its turnaround plan. 

Asos told customers on Thursday morning that it has launched a “detailed investigation” into the incident, apologising for the “uncertainty” caused by the notification. The update was the group’s first message directly to shoppers since the hack.

Paresh Raja, the chief executive of Market Financial Solutions who has denied claims he siphoned “vast sums” from the mortgage firm, has asked the High Court to force all competing claims against him into a single, coordinated process.

The company confirmed on Wednesday that it was reducing headcount across its Stores division, which oversees its core online retail operations, with employees in the UK, US and India among those affected.

While Amazon has not publicly disclosed the scale of the cuts, City AM understands the number of affected employees is in the hundreds, with only a handful impacted within its UK workforce.

This follows HMRC winning an appeal in June against the Estonian tech giant over its VAT payments and calculations, overturning earlier decisions that had ruled in Bolt’s favour.

The tax authority brought the appeal, questioning whether Bolt could use the tour operators’ margin scheme (TOMS). Under this scheme, businesses only pay VAT on the profit margin they make between buying a service and selling it to the customer. By qualifying for this scheme, Bolt must account for VAT only on the commission it takes from the fare, rather than the entire gross fare paid by the passenger.

The FTSE 100 company said on Thursday it now expects VodafoneThree to deliver £1bn in annual savings by 2032, up from its previous target of £700m by 2030.

The upgraded target comes just over two months after Vodafone completed a £4.3bn buyout of CK Hutchison’s remaining 49 per cent stake in the business, giving it full control of Britain’s largest mobile operator.

Despite the rise of stories depicting the epidemic, the horrors of AIDS are still underrepresented in film and TV. Russell T Davies’ It’s A Sin brought freshness by focusing on fleeting moments of joy, and Simon Stone’s Elsinore borrows from that playbook with this magnificent story that follows one victim’s remarkable life.

At their party conference in Birmingham, the Tories tried their best to bring back the good times. Reporters who have been following the Conservatives for years privately joked that the labyrinth conference centre had about a third of the amount of people as when the party was in government.

The NBA wants its European basketball competition to replicate the dynamic between football’s Champions League and Europa League. Much of the rest of the detail surrounding a property slated for launch next year remains under wraps.

Following the death of novelist and former political Jeffrey Archer, Eliot Wilson looks back at a complicated life.

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