Barnes and Noble tonight confirmed it was hacked, and that its customers’ personal information may have been accessed by the intruders. The cyber-break-in forced the bookseller to take its systems offline this week to clean up the mess. See our update at the end of this piece. Our original report follows.
Bookseller Barnes and Noble’s computer network fell over this week, and its IT staff are having to restore servers from backups.
The effects of the collapse were first felt on Sunday, with owners of B&N’s Nook tablets discovering they were unable to download their purchased e-books to their gadgets nor buy new ones. That is to say, if they had bought an e-book and hadn’t downloaded it to their device before B&N’s cloud imploded, they would be unable to open and read the digital tome. The bookseller’s Android and Windows 10 apps were similarly affected.
It soon became clear the problem was quite serious when some cash registers in Barnes and Noble’s physical stores also briefly stopped working.
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Shortly after this article was published, Barnes & Noble confirmed in an email to customers that it was hacked. The biz said it found out over the weekend, on October 10, that miscreants had broken into its computer systems, adding that customers’ personal information stored on file may have been accessed or taken by the intruders. This info includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, and purchase histories.
Robin Edgar
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