Barnes & Noble, the largest book store chain in the US has reported a cyberattack incident, where some data of its customers could have been breached. This was initially reported as a system failure since users complained about the inaccessibility of services for a while into its online eBook service. Barnes & Noble assured that no financial data was stolen in this incident.

Barnes & Nobel Report Cyberattack

Barnes & Noble is named as the largest book store chain having 650+ outlets across all the US states. While itโ€™s going good in the era of the physical books, the advent of online resources like eBooks has dented the companyโ€™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 itโ€™s hardly surviving, it was hit by a cyberattack, possibly ransomware, which hit the companyโ€™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 companyโ€™s cash registers were unable to function for a while. This rose the speculations of some malware injection until Barnes & Noble came out saying itโ€™s a โ€œsystem failureโ€, and itโ€™s working to bring them back online.

But later, as per e-mails sent to customers on October 10th, the company acknowledged that itโ€™s a victim of a cyberattack, saying โ€œunauthorized and unlawful access to certain Barnes & Noble corporate systems.โ€ It assured that no financial data like the credit card details were breached in this attack since they are encrypted and tokenized.

Yet, thereโ€™s some data theft as it says. Barnes & Noble noted that PII like the
customerโ€™s email addresses, phone numbers, billing and shipping addresses transaction histories could have been exposed in the breach. It said, โ€œWe currently have no evidence of the exposure of any of this data, but we cannot at this stage rule out the possibility.โ€

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