Bibliofind.com, an online marketplace with a database of some 9 million hard-to-find books, is the latest Internet company to suffer a serious hacking.
Bibliofind.com, which became an Amazon.com subsidiary back in April 1999 after an acquisiton by Amazon of Biblio’s parent company exchange.com, has revealed that the hacking apparently compromised the security of customer credit card information used on its servers between October 2000 and February 2001.
According to Bibliofind.com’s spokesperson Jim Courtovich, the breech was discovered on February 26, when the site’s homepage was defaced with electronic grafitti.
According to an Amazon.com’s spokesperson Patty Smith, the security of Amazon’s systems were never in question as a result of Bibliofind.com’s hacking incident. “They operate on a totally separate operating platform than Amazon. Our two systems don’t communicate in any way,” says Smith.
As regard servers, seattle.internet.com has learned that Bibliofind.com operates on a Windows NT 4.0 and is hosted by Exodus.
In a statement issued this morning, Cambridge, Massachussetts-based Bibliofind.com says that they are in contact with federal law enforcement authorities, and today began notifying all affected customers directly by email.
Bibliofind hopes to bring its service back into operation shortly. In the meantime, it has removed all customer credit card information, physical addresses and phone numbers from its servers.
Brian McWilliams of Internet News Radio, contributed to this story.