Barnes & Noble Cyberattack

Barnes & Noble warned customers via email to be “on high alert” following an October 10 data breach.

While we do not know if any personal information was exposed as a result of the attack, we do retain in the impacted systems your billing and shipping addresses, your email address and your telephone number if you have supplied these… It is possible that your email address was exposed and, as a result, you may receive unsolicited emails… We currently have no evidence of the exposure of any of this data, but we cannot at this stage rule out the possibility….

The company claims that payment card information was not accessed.

B&N began to suffer widespread computer issues on the 10th. Customers had difficulty accessing their Nook ebooks and logging into the BN.com website, and some experienced delays in shipping. The troubles weren’t just online; in-store customers had problems at the checkout counters, and there were issues with placing special orders and finding stock in the inventory system (all computer-related processes). The issues were mostly solved by the 13th, when a B&N spokesperson said,

We have a serious network issue and are in the process of restoring our server backups. Our systems are back online in our stores and on BN.com and we are investigating the cause. Please be assured that there is no compromise of customer payment details which are encrypted and tokenized.

On the 14th, the company admitted the “network issue” was in fact “a cybersecurity attack, which resulted in unauthorized and unlawful access to certain Barnes & Noble corporate systems.” They contacted customers out of “an abundance of caution… As of writing, the cybersecurity consultants have detected no evidence of data having been exposed.”

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