Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary Bibliofind.com said Monday that hackers stole the company’s customer records, including credit card information, according to a report in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday.
Hackers have had access to customer data from October 2000 through February 2001, said the report, citing an e-mail sent by Bibliofind to its customers on Monday. Some 98,000 customers of Bibliofind are affected, according to the report.
Bibliofind, an online market place for hard-to-find old books, said it has notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation and credit card companies of the incident, according to the e-mail message cited in the report. So far, there has been no indication that credit cards have been misused, but to prevent customer data from being compromised in the future, the company has removed all customer credit card numbers, physical addresses, and phone numbers from its servers, according to the report.
The service, which was acquired by Seattle-based Amazon.com in 1999, went offline last Friday, fuelling speculation in Internet newsgroups that the Wednesday earthquake hit the company. In fact Bibliofind is based in Massachusetts and the site was down because the security breach was discovered. Bibliofind went back online on Monday.
Bibliofind can be found at http://www.bibliofind.com/. Amazon.com Inc., in Seattle, can be reached at http://www.amazon.com/.