If the net seems somewhat slow to you in the next couple of days, don't worry. It's just the lag caused by 98,000 pieces of email being sent out to various Bibliofind customers, telling them that their credit card numbers have been compromised.

While you probably saw a number of stories on Monday blaming hackers for the online bookseller's woes, one has to wonder what would possess a company in today's day and age to be so sloppy with customer data. And assuming that it was a hacker who accessed their servers seems a bit premature, since the only evidence of actual hacking came from a defaced web page in February. And if these clowns were actually storing unencrypted credit card numbers on the same machine that housed an insecure web site... well, don't get us started.

While there's no evidence of any of the potentially compromised data being misused, we feel that's a matter of opinion. As soon as private information of this sort was stored in a manner where even authorized persons could get at it through an insecure method, the data was misused. And look what it took to get this situation remedied - evidence of unauthorized access. How long would this have continued if that HADN'T happened?

In addition to removing the credit card numbers, Bibliofind has also taken customer addresses and phone numbers off its site, presumably while they prepare to install better security and keep credit card numbers inaccessible.

We welcome them to the 1990's.