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MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL HAS said that up to 500 million hotel guests may have had their data compromised in a hack of the Starwood reservation database.
The Shelbourne Hotel and the Westin Hotel in Dublin are part of the Marriott International group. The Shelbourne Hotel has confirmed that it has never been a Starwood hotel.
Marriott said it was alerted on 8 September that there had been an attempt to hack their reservation database in the US.
The company launched a probe, and discovered “that there had been unauthorised access to the Starwood network since 2014″.
They discovered “that an unauthorised party had copied and encrypted information, and took steps towards removing it”.
On 19 November, Marriott ”was able to decrypt the information and determined that the contents were from the Starwood guest reservation database”.
Other hotels in the Starwood network include Sheraton, Four Points by Sheraton and W Hotels.
“We deeply regret this incident happened,” said Arne Sorenson, Marriott’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
“We fell short of what our guests deserve and what we expect of ourselves.”
With reporting by Hayley Halpin
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So the hackers have had over two months freedom to start doing their business and the Marriott didn’t think to notify their hacked customers to change passwords, check credit card transactions? Wow!
@Brendan Cooney: 4 yrs of unauthorised access in the story.
Check if any major shareholder sold their shares before the breach was announced.
Phew…..it only affects customers who stayed at the Shelbourne, the Marriotts etc….thought travelodge patrons might also be affected.
GDPR?
@Brian Moloney: GDPR is a European legislation but this a developing story , if their European Hotels customers data ( very likely ) was compromised and they haven’t followed the GDPR guidelines they are likely to be exposed to very substantial financial penalties -not to mention the damage to their business – even the delay in notifying customers the breach happened will prove costly for their business – i don’t think many irish business realise how vulnerable they are as they increasingly move into digital and mobile world – hotels are prime target as they hold a lot of valuable customer data including passport , credit card , passwords from using wifi in hotels etc etc ….this is a massive breach !!
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