Barnes & Nobel Report Cyberattack
Barnes & Noble is named as the largest book store chain having 650+ outlets across all the US states. While it’s going good in the era of the physical books, the advent of online resources like eBooks has dented the company’s growth, which led Barnes & Nobel to close most of its stores in the country. The company, however, launched an online service called Nook, to let users read eBooks from its store. While it’s hardly surviving, it was hit by a cyberattack, possibly ransomware, which hit the company’s online services and some data loss. This started when some users complained about the deletion of this order purchases and inaccessibility of the Nook platform. Also, a report from The Register says the cyberattack has even impacted the physical stores since some of the company’s cash registers were unable to function for a while. This rose the speculations of some malware injection until Barnes & Noble came out saying it’s a “system failure”, and it’s working to bring them back online. But later, as per e-mails sent to customers on October 10th, the company acknowledged that it’s a victim of a cyberattack, saying “unauthorized and unlawful access to certain Barnes & Noble corporate systems.” It assured that no financial data like the credit card details were breached in this attack since they are encrypted and tokenized. Yet, there’s some data theft as it says. Barnes & Noble noted that PII like the customer’s email addresses, phone numbers, billing and shipping addresses transaction histories could have been exposed in the breach. It said, “We currently have no evidence of the exposure of any of this data, but we cannot at this stage rule out the possibility.”
