Hack Victim Bibliofind To Move to Amazon

A month after announcing that its customers’ credit card information was exposed to hack attacks, Bibliofind.com said Thursday that it will move its operations to the site of its parent company, Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN).

Bibliofind informed customers and merchants this week that it will take up residence in Amazon’s Marketplace and zShops areas beginning May 7th.

A spokesman for 5-year-old Waltham, Massachusetts-based Bibliofind, which connects rare and used booksellers with customers around the world, said the move had no connection to the revelations that credit card information had been exposed over a four-month period beginning last October.

“We just see it as the best way to move forward,” spokesman Jim Courtovich told the Associated Press. “It has been in the planning stages for some time.”

However, Bibliofind has been unable to use its own payment system since it announced on March 5th that its secure servers had been breached.

Stuck in Neutral

Since then, customers have been asked to make arrangements to pay booksellers directly, which often required offline payment methods.

Once it is located in the zShops area, Bibliofind can have payments collected by Amazon, freeing Bibliofind from having to collect or maintain customer information.

Under Investigation

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues to investigate the breach, Bibliofind said, and all affected users have been notified by e-mail. Bibliofind said that hackers may have been able to download the names, addresses and credit card information of about 98,000 customers.

The e-tailer’s hack revelations came not long after computer products e-tailer Egghead.com said that its servers had been hacked, though an investigation later revealed that no credit card data was exposed.

Around the same time, hackers infiltrated CreditCards.com, stole as many as 55,000 credit card numbers and posted them on the Internet.

Big Family

Bibliofind became part of the sprawling Amazon family in 1999 when the e-tail giant bought Exchange.com. That acquisition was part of a US$645 million shopping spree by Amazon that also included Accept.com and Alexa Internet, whose Web-navigation service has come under fire for tracking users’ online movements.

In a departure from Amazon’s own privacy policy, Bibliofind said that it has no plans to transfer existing customer information to the e-tailer. Last year, causing outcries from privacy groups, Amazon changed its privacy policy to give itself and its subsidiaries the right to transfer customer information in the event of sales, mergers or acquisitions.