Legendary bookseller Barnes & Noble is having a tough week on the cybersecurity front. After a week of customers having major network issues connecting to the Nook e-reader network they then announced that they were the victim of a cyberattack and their customers data might have been exposed. This is the kind of thing that happens all of the time in many large and small data breaches around the world. Sometimes attackers even get in a network and get data without even being detected. Thankfully, customers payment information was not said to have been breached. This is rough when every bookseller outside of Amazon is said to be struggling a bit.
Seeing this indicates very clearly why you want to minimize the public exposure of all of your data online. Cybercriminals and identity thieves buy up these data leaks on the dark web and then get set targeting unaware individuals. If your personally identifying information (PII) is publicly available on all kinds of data broker sites, people search engines, and social media, it just makes the criminals job that much easier to hack their way into your bank account and credit cards.
You never want to get the following type of data breach disclosure email notification in your inbox. Here are a few excerpts from it below. Use this as a warning and maintain smart security best practices to avoid becoming the newest victim.
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 details. Firstly, to reassure you, there has been no compromise of payment card or other such financial data. These are encrypted and tokenized and not accessible. The systems impacted, however, did contain your email address and, if supplied by you, your billing and shipping address and telephone number. We currently have no evidence of the exposure of any of this data, but we cannot at this stage rule out the possibility.
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