Barnes & Noble emailed customers Wednesday night to notify them that the company had been the victim of a recent cyberattack.
“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,” the company wrote in an email to customers who may have been affected.
The company stressed that payment information was not at risk during the attack.
“There has been no compromise of payment card or other such financial data. These are encrypted and tokenized and not accessible,” the email read.
Information that may have been accessed included personal information attached to the account. The company continued, “The systems impacted, however, did contain your email address and, if supplied by you, your billing and shipping address and telephone number.”
Barnes & Noble currently has no evidence that any of that information was compromised.
Though the information is not necessarily dangerous on its own, there is a concern that any information obtained from the attack could be sold on the black market, where bad actors can piece together that information with other data obtained elsewhere for a full profile “to steal people’s identities and money,” according to CNN.
The cyberattack hits Barnes & Noble at a time when online sales are more important for the company than ever. Amid the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown that ensued, Barnes & Noble was forced to close most of its stores, according to Publishers Weekly. In April, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt sent an email to employees notifying them of sweeping furloughs and layoffs after revenue “declined in an unprecedented manner.”
In August, Barnes & Noble closed its Power Plant store in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, one of the company’s largest bookstores in the country. In a statement to the Baltimore Sun, spokesman Alex Ortolani said the company shut down the location because its “exceptionally large and architecturally beautiful” design “now make it extraordinarily expensive to both run and to maintain.”
