Barnes & Noble discloses a cyber attack

Barnes & Noble discloses a cyber attack

U.S. bookstore giant Barnes & Noble has confirmed it has suffered a cyber attack that exposed customers’ personal data.

Barnes & Noble experienced an outage last week, that affected the company’s cloud unit and the entire Nook system. According to Good e-Reader, multiple users reported at the time they were unable to sync recent purchases to their e-readers, or read most books on their device. The B&N website was also unavailable.

Barnes & Noble said in a statement it has suffered a cyber attack, during which attackers gained unauthorized access to the corporate systems and stole the data, including emails, shipping address, billing address and phone numbers, as well as transaction history. Credit cards or other financial data were not compromised in the attack, as they are encrypted and tokenized.

“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. We write now out of the greatest caution to let you know how this may have exposed some of the information we hold of your personal detail,” the company said in an email sent to its customers.

The company did not reveal the exact nature of the cyber attack, but, according to Good e-Reader, store managers said that Barnes & Noble had a "virus in their networks" that started in the corporate offices and eventually spread to the stores.

Back to the list

Latest Posts

Researchers caught embedding hidden AI prompts to sway research reviewers

Researchers caught embedding hidden AI prompts to sway research reviewers

The investigation analyzed English-language preprints published on the research platform arXiv and found concealed AI instructions in 17 papers.
7 July 2025
Brazilian programmer arrested for role in $185 million bank hack

Brazilian programmer arrested for role in $185 million bank hack

João Nazareno Roque, a junior back-end developer at C&M, was allegedly recruited by hackers in a bar in São Paulo.
7 July 2025
APT36 cyber-espionage campaign targeting Indian defense sector via BOSS Linux

APT36 cyber-espionage campaign targeting Indian defense sector via BOSS Linux

More recently, APT36 has shifted its focus to Linux-based environments.
7 July 2025