American bookselling giant Barnes & Noble recently made headlines because of a data breach that may have exposed their customers’ confidential and sensitive information to hackers.
In the email sent to their customers, Barnes & Noble mentioned how they only became aware of the cybersecurity attack that resulted in unauthorized and unlawful access to certain Barnes & Noble corporate systems around October 10, 2020.
In addition to letting their shoppers know about the data security incident, the Fortune 1000 company also tried to reassure their customers that their payment card or other financial data hadn’t been compromised – as they are encrypted, tokenized and inaccessible. The email went onto explain to their loyal clients that the systems impacted were those that contained their email addresses, billing and shipping addresses and telephone numbers.
Although the Barnes & Noble data breach has placed their customer’s sensitive data at great risk, it pales in comparison to some of the biggest and most historical data breaches. One of the biggest incidents was back in 2018 with the Facebook data breach that compromised over 50 million Facebook accounts for three days before the company’s announcement.