Zappos hacked: 24 million customers warned by shoe retailer their personal information compromised 

Company apologizes to customers, employees

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

By Meena Hart Duerson

Monday, January 16 2012

Online shoe powerhouse Zappos.com fell victim to hackers over the weekend, leaving 24 million customers exposed.

The company put out a statement late Sunday night informing customers of the incident and asking them to change their passwords.

“We were recently the victim of a cyber attack by a criminal who gained access to parts of our internal network and systems through one of our servers in Kentucky,” the company said in an email to employees, which was posted to the Zappos blog. “We are cooperating with law enforcement to undergo an exhaustive investigation.”

They also spread the word to employees in an email which was posted to the company blog.

The company said “there may have been illegal and unauthorized access” to customer information including names, e-mail addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of customers’ credit card numbers.

“The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed,” the company promised.

Zappos — which is owned by Amazon — reset the passwords of its more than 24 million customers and encouraged users to change the passwords if they used them on other sites.

Known for its customer service, Zappos said in the memo it has chosen to field all customer questions via email. “We have made the hard decision to turn off our phones and direct customers to contact us by email because our phone systems simply aren’t capable of handling so much volume. (If 5% of our customers call, that would be over 1 million phone calls, most of which would not even make it into our phone system in the first place.),” the internal email from CEO Tony Hsieh reads.

“We’ve spent over 12 years building our reputation, brand, and trust with our customers. It’s painful to see us take so many steps back due to a single incident,” Hsieh wrote.

Zappos is the latest in a string of high profile hacking victims hit by cyber crime this weekend.

The Huffington Post’s Twitter account was hacked on Sunday, as an intruder posted a string of racist and gay-bashing messages.

Ashton Kutcher said he too was hacked on Sunday. “So apparently someone thinks they are clever hacking my account. #lame,” he wrote in a series of tweets that were later removed. “Ok mr hacker, you only made one mistake. You hacked my Foursquare and I now know your address. Whoops…This is going to be fun.”