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| Cyber | |
| Barnes & Nobels ‘NOOK’ hacked down. | |
| 2020-10-15 | |
| [The Passive Voice] Yesterday, PG posted about a severe computer outage at Barnes & Noble that reportedly took down the system Barnes & Noble’s physical stores use for orders, inventory control, etc., as well as the Nook store and the ability of Nook users to synchronize their devices, access ebooks not already stored on their Nooks, etc. This problem took Barnes & Noble about three days from the first report PG read to fix the problem. To the best of PG’s current knowledge, only two websites, GoodEreader (October 10) and The Digital Reader (October 13), reported on the outage. Ergo, the entire Nook system went down and nobody noticed.
PG suggests that this is perhaps the best evidence yet that the Nook ereader and Nook’s ebookstore don’t matter any more. Perhaps they’re not dead (at least today), but are semi-comatose. At least in North America, it appears that Kobo may be #2 behind the Zon. Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, the hope for traditional publishing’s future in the US, has, to the best of PG’s knowledge, had nothing to say about the ebook disaster (and physical bookstore ordering, etc., disaster) that appears to have been occurring in the US company for which he is the CEO. If PG has missed something that Daunt or Barnes & Noble PR department has said about this matter, he would be happy to hear about it via the Contact link for The Passive Voice. | |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #6 Bezos didn't need to do the hacking. His friends in China would do it for him. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2020-10-15 13:45 |
| #5 And re: your comment about the brick n' mortar store, Magpie, it was a nice place to browse and I still need to go there if I need a new atlas on occasion. Actually, a cup of tea from the in-store Starbucks is all the business that woke outfit would ever get from me. Right now I'm wondering if their assertion that no billing or credit card info has been compromised is honest or accurate. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2020-10-15 11:14 |
| #4 /\ Concur with M. Murcek. There were books on Nook that didn't appear on Kindle. |
| Posted by: magpie 2020-10-15 10:42 |
| #3 Until last Saturday night, Nook was every bit as viable as Kindle for ebooks. Only rarely was a book available on Kindle but not on Nook, and, (surprise, surprise) those selections tended to be stuff I wasn't in the market for anyway. For a person who might want to immediately grab a book he / she has just found a mention of, ebooks are the way to go. At one time, Microsoft was going to acquire or become a major partner in the Nook part of B&N's business. Jokes (well deserved) about how MS kills its acquisitions aside, I'd imagine this problem would have been less likely to happen it the Nook infrastructure was hosted on Azure right now. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2020-10-15 10:30 |
| #2 I used to go to the local Barnes & Noble once a week regular as clockwork. Scour the Fantasy/SF section and then browse the History, Military History, Computers and Magazine rack. There was a nice Soup n' Salad place across the parking lot where I would read the tech magazines... Then B&N went Yuppy. Aggressively yuppified with a Starbucksâ„¢-lite coffee bar and almost blocked off the entrance with tables hawking the current left wing political hack job. Just didn't feel like they wanted "My kind of people" there so I left. If people ask why Walmart and Amazon are "winning" they only need to ask why they seem to disdain half (or more!) of their potential customers. |
| Posted by: magpie 2020-10-15 10:15 |
| #1 B&N put out an email yesterday sadly warning their customers that "some customer information" may have been exposed in the incident. *** Dear Barnes & Noble Customer, 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. We give below answers to some frequently asked questions. We take the security of our IT systems extremely seriously and regret sincerely that this incident has occurred. We know also that it is concerning and inconvenient to receive notices such as this. We greatly appreciate your understanding and thank you for being a Barnes & Noble customer. Barnes & Noble FAQ 1. Have my payment details been exposed? No, your payment details have not been exposed. Barnes & Noble uses technology that encrypts all credit cards and at no time is there any unencrypted payment information in any Barnes & Noble system. 2. Could a transaction be made without my authorization? No, no financial information was accessible. It is always encrypted and tokenized. 3. Was my email compromised? No. Your email was not compromised as a result of this attack. However, it is possible that your email address was exposed and, as a result, you may receive unsolicited emails. 4. Was any personal information exposed due to the attack? While we do not know if any personal information was exposed as a result of the attack, we do retain in the impacted systems your billing and shipping addresses, your email address and your telephone number if you have supplied these. 5. Do you retain any other information in the impacted systems? Yes, we also retain your transaction history, meaning purchase information related to the books and other products that you have bought from us. *** No mention of the Nook infrastructure being down. Certainly no mention of if / when it might be back (and, yes, there is speculation going on that this may be a kill shot for B&N in its entirety). They finally got around to making this incomplete announcement of their problems, in between multiple emails a day flogging Mike Obama's book and critical race theory garbage books. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2020-10-15 07:38 |