Dymocks is one of the oldest bookstores in Australia and has been in business since 1879. The bookseller emailed their customers, letting them know they had a massive data breach. What details were stolen by the hackers? Email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, genders and dates of birth could form part of the breached data, as well as membership details. They have warned customers to monitor their credit cards and online banking to ensure no unauthorized charges are made.
Dymocks said it did not know which or how many customers had been impacted or how the breach occurred. Given that passwords might be on the dark web, Dymocks said customers should change the passwords for their online accounts — including their Dymocks and social media accounts. “We will continue to undertake a thorough investigation of the incident by the applicable laws,” Dymocks said. “We will continue to keep you informed because we take the security of your personal information seriously, and we are committed to being open and transparent.” The company said it would notify the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner once it had completed its investigation.
Data breaches from major booksellers with a heavy online presence are nothing new. Last February, Chapters Indigo, the largest bookseller in Canada, was hit by a ransomware attack. For a couple of weeks afterwards, they accepted cash only for in-store book sales online, and their website remained down for almost a month. It wasn’t until another Canadian company, Shopify, that Indigo even allowed online sales again. Indigo reported that the downtime and hack cost them 50 million dollars in lost sales and prompted them to purchase cyber security insurance to compensate for another hack in the future.
In 2020, Barnes and Noble also had a cyber security incident. The outage affected their cloud unit and the entire Nook system. People could not sync recent purchases to their e-readers or read most books on their devices. The B&N website was down for about a week, and people couldn’t even log into their accounts. Cash registers experienced an outage and were lagging for almost a week. Nook e-readers were the last thing to be restored and took multiple weeks for everything to return to normal.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
