Barnes & Noble hacked: credit card readers replaced in 63 stores

[thewayne]

Dunno where the stores were. B&N notified credit card processors and the FBI.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/hackers-get-credit-data-at-barnes-noble.html?_r=2&

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/barnes-and-noble-pos-hack/

Comments

[droewyn.livejournal.com]

Relevant to my interests:

The company said that purchases at its college bookstores and on BarnesandNoble.com, Nook, Nook mobile apps and its member database were not affected by the hacking. It did not say, however, whether it would now be telling individual customers that their information had been stolen.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

As a rule I don't buy from them online because if they have it in stock I'll just get it then, it's been a few years since I last got something kind of rare from them shipped. Though we have a Nook, mostly I get books from Gutenberg or various game PDFs that I acquire.

We were in B&N on Friday, and sure enough, the card reader was not on the counter. I talked to the woman about the hack, she said with the exception of Chicago, it was exclusively east coast/west coast stores that were hit.

The sad thing is how this is so much the norm these days rather than the exception. The register/card reader manufacturers could make their systems capable of detecting tampering, but they don't, because it would make installation, upgrades, and repairs more difficult. So we have to put up with the occasional inconvenience of us, the customers, having to cancel credit cards and fight with banks to get our stolen money back.

I have had one case where I had a credit card hacked. I was in Phoenix, going to Las Vegas for a convention in a few days, when an $80 charge appeared on my card for a gas purchase in North Carolina, a place that I hadn't been to in five years or more. The bank verified my purchase patterns, put the money back in my account within a couple of days, and canceled my card. Fortunately the bank had a branch in Phoenix and I was able to get a replacement sent there. Turns out that a credit card processor in Albuquerque was hacked, it wasn't in the news. The clerk at B&N told me she knew someone whose card was stolen, taken to a gas station, and the thief and all of his friends and friends of friends filled up there car to the tune of $700+. Apparently he had a major fight on his hand with the bank, and forget about getting the police to investigate, much less make an arrest in, such incidents.