Indigo Books and Music will not allow orders to be placed online and paying in their retail stores with a bank card and credit card is not allowed, cash only. They are not accepting returns either, or payment by gift card. Indigo also said customers who recently purchased items online may experience delays with part or all of their order. Why this this happening? It is due to a cyber security incident.
The cyber security incident took place on Wednesday and is still not resolved. “We are working with third-party experts to investigate and resolve the situation,” the company said in a message posted on its website. In response to queries on its Twitter page Indigo says it is trying to understand if customer data was compromised.
The company hasn’t given much detail about what is going on, but David Masson, director of enterprise security at cybersecurity firm Darktrace, says the sheer length of the problem suggests it wasn’t an internal error, and rather an instance of ransomware, where hackers steal information, lock systems and demand a ransom to release them. “Their point-of-sale system has gone down… and they’ve also said that they’re unable to take returns anymore, which kind of implies that they’re unable to bring stock back into the system.”
I think it is very likely that Indigo will have to restore backups and this could take weeks, depending on the amount of data. They will have to manually restore database tables for customer orders that occured from when the last known good backup was made and whatever orders were placed afterwards.
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.
