It wasn’t a secret. It was a notification—a ransom note in over a hundred characters—that suddenly popped up on the mobile app of a popular fashion brand that has over 16 million active users globally.

London-based fashion brand Asos saw a data breach by a group of hackers last Tuesday who posted an in-app notification that said Asos has been “hacked” and that its data storage provider Snowflake had been “fully compromised.”

This week, U.K. newspaper the Times reported that H&M is currently investigating claims that it has also been hacked by the same group of hackers, although they went by a different name. The Swedish clothing brand said that no breach has been found.

Whether or not these are related events, it understandably raises consumer concerns about data security, not to mention stock drops, as shoppers and investors grapple with what they know about the hack and, more concerningly, what they don’t.

For well-renowned cybersecurity expert Justin Cappos, this begs another equally important question: Why do fashion brands need to have their own apps in the first place?

Cappos, a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at New York University, considers this a consequence of the current data-hungry retail culture that baits shoppers with incentives like retail discounts and app-only pricing in exchange of downloading the app.

“I do think that users should be much more cautious about where they provide their information,” he told Sourcing Journal.

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