Sadly, yet another large corporation has been hit with a cyber attack.
Back in December Hyatt Hotels discovered a data breach had occurred after malware targeted their payment processing systems. At the time Hyatt couldn’t provide much information about the breach as it was just discovering the issue and beginning to investigate.
This week Hyatt released details of their investigation and the results were pretty shocking.
The first major red flag is the timeframe in which customer payment cards were exposed. Hyatt found that customer cards were compromised from August 13th to December 8th. This means it took Hyatt almost four months to discover malware in their systems.
Secondly, the majority of the compromised card information was used at restaurants, spas, golf shops, parking systems, and front desks & sales offices at around 250 locations in approximately 50 different countries. The unsettling part of this particular point is that the compromised cards were used all over the world, and not just in the US, meaning anyone anywhere is a potential cyber crime victim.
Hyatt is working with cyber security experts to help strengthen their security measures and ensure this doesn’t happen to customers again. Notification letters are being sent to those affected by the cyber attack and customers can also contact Hyatt if they found unfamiliar activity on their credit cards. Unfortunately Hyatt is just another name in a long string of hotel chain cyber attacks – Hilton Worldwide, Starwood, and Mandarin Oriental all dealt with similar events last year.
With the FTC focusing more on security in 2016, there is hope that these breaches will slowly become a thing of the past – New ‘chip’ systems in credit cards should also help mitigate the risk of compromised credit card information. In the meantime, vigilance is key for both companies and consumers alike; we can only hope to see stronger security rise and risk decrease.