8,400 customers affected by data leak of world-renown auction house

Over 8,000 collectors' personal information that was stored by auction house Christie's may have been compromised by hackers, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data said on Tuesday.

The privacy watchdog said they had received a notification from Christie's yesterday (Jun 3) about the data breach, which affects around 8,400 clients in Hong Kong.

The personal data involved includes names, date of birth, residential addresses, passport numbers, gender and nationality.

The affected people have received an email notification from Christie's stating that on May 9, the company discovered that a third party had unauthorized access to part of Christie's network and downloaded some customers' personal data, but there was no evidence that any financial or transaction records were leaked.

The hacker group RansomHub earlier claimed to have invaded the system of the auction house, obtained the personal information of more than 500,000 collectors, and threatened to disclose the information.