Adidas: Customer Contact Info Stolen in Data Breach

German sportswear company Adidas has reported a data breach involving a customer service provider.

The company announced Friday (May 23) that cybercriminals had accessed customer data via a third-party customer service provider, while noting that the breach did not involve passwords or credit card data.

“We immediately took steps to contain the incident and launched a comprehensive investigation, collaborating with leading information security experts,” the company said in a statement posted to its website. “Adidas is in the process of informing potentially affected consumers.”

According to the company, the data in question primarily consisted of contact information for customers who had been in touch with Adidas’ customer service help desk.

This month, the company dealt with a series of data breaches, per a recent report by CyberDaily, one in South Korea and the other in Türkiye. It was not immediately clear if these cases were related to the breach Adidas announced Friday.

The cyberattack on Adidas is happening at a time when nearly a third of data breaches involve a third party, as covered here earlier this month.

Findings from the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report showed that 30% of breaches during the year ending Oct. 31 involved a third party, up from 15% the prior year. The report added that third parties such as suppliers, vendors, hosting partners and outsourced IT support providers function as custodians to companies’ data and uphold crucial parts of those organizations’ operations.

Verizon said in the report, “When you are working with a third party, you have to consider their security limitations as well as your own.” It also recommended that companies ask themselves when creating planning scenarios: “What happens if this partner is attacked?”

The most prominent third-party breach involved Snowflake, according to the report, with that attack snowballing to affect more than 160 of the world’s largest companies, including AT&T, Santander Bank, Advance Auto Parts and Ticketmaster parent company LiveNation.

With third-party software and hardware continuing to be a major vector for attacks, businesses are taking a more stringent approach to supply chain risk management.

“Everyone has been dealing with cybersecurity for a long time,” XiFin Chief Financial Officer Erik Sallee told PYMNTS in an interview posted in June of last year. “There’s no way around it other than blocking and tackling, doing the right thing every day, keeping all your systems up to date, making sure you’re working with good vendors and investing in it.”