The largest bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble (more than 600 stores in 50 states), which also operates the Nook Digital e-book platform, suffered a hack last week. Now it turned out that Egregor ransomware successfully attacked Barnes & Noble.
The attack took place on October 10, 2020, after which many users noticed the unavailability of a number of the company’s services, and employees reported that a virus “penetrated” the Barnes & Noble network, which initially hit corporate offices, and then reached offline stores, where it affected the work of cash registers and interfered with the system of placing the orders.However, Barnes & Noble experts did ventured to claim that hackers did not gain access to other personal information. The book giant has admitted that email addresses, billing addresses, shipping addresses, and purchase history have likely been compromised.
Now journalists from Bleeping Computer write that a hacker recently contacted them, saying that the hack group Egregor was responsible for this attack.
Egregor is a relatively new threat. This hack group has been active only since mid-September of this year, but has already managed to get into the headlines, since last week it announced that it had managed to compromise the largest game developers – Ubisoft and Crytek, and steal their data, including the source codes not yet the released game Watch Dogs:Legion.
Now the operators of Egregor have confirmed the words of the Bleeping Computer source, saying that they hacked Barnes & Noble and stole financial and audit data from the company. On its website on the darknet, the group posted files that were allegedly stolen during the attack.
So far, instead of confidential information, this leak shows only parts of the Windows registry, which, apparently, were exported from the servers of Barnes & Noble. While this can be regarded as an indirect confirmation that Egregor’s operators were indeed involved in the attack, it does not prove that the hackers actually stole any financial documents or other files.
Representatives of Barnes & Noble have not yet commented on the group’s statements.
