American bookselling giant Barnes & Noble is contacting customers via email, warning them that its network was breached by hackers, and that sensitive information about shoppers may have been accessed.In the email to customers, Barnes & Noble says that it became aware that it had fallen victim to a cybersecurity attack on Saturday October 10th.
Part of the email reads:“It is with the greatest regret we inform you that we were made aware on October 10, 2020 that Barnes & Noble had been the victim of a cybersecurity attack, which resulted in unauthorized and unlawful access to certain Barnes & Noble corporate systems.”“Your payment details have not been exposed. Barnes & Noble uses technology that encrypts all credit cards and at no time is there any unencrypted payment information in any Barnes & Noble system. No financial information was accessible. It is always encrypted and tokenized.”However, although payment information might be considered at risk – the bookseller says that there was personal information stored on the compromised servers, including customers’ email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, and telephone numbers.In addition, Barnes & Noble stores details of customers’ past transactions, revealing a history of books and other products that have been purchased from the retailer in the past. Depending on your literary tastes, that clearly could prove embarrassing.The company says that although it has no evidence that the personal details have been exposed by the security breach, it “cannot at this stage rule out the possibility.”When I hear a company say, effectively, “it doesn’t know” if certain details were accessed by hackers my recommendation is to assume the worst.The confirmation of a security breach came after a weekend of complaints from Barnes & Noble customers who complained that they were unable to download books they had purchased to their Nook ebook readers:“I’d really really really like ..
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