Are you more vulnerable to credit card theft if you stay in a hotel?
No need to get paranoid, but it is a valid question, since online security firm Trustwave Spiderlabs consider hotels hackers’ No. 1 target. It’s also a timely question since Wyndham Hotels just yesterday announced that hackers stole customer credit card information by breaching its networks. It’s Wyndham’s third breach in 12 months.
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To understand the problem better, I recently talked with online security expert Nicholas Percoco, who works as a security auditor and data breach investigator for the security firm Trustwave SpiderLabs. The firm investigates breaches for companies and figures out how they happen.
“This is a new trend. Prior to late 2008, we did not really see any investigations around hotels – maybe a handful,” Percoco told me during our conversation. “But it was not something significant enough to call it a trend.”
In the firm’s recent study of 218 breach investigations across 24 countries last year, Trustwave found that hotels accounted for about 70 of them – making them hackers’ favorite hackers, even over the financial services companies.
His theory is that sometime in late 2008, a fairly sophisticated group hacked into a single hotel and they identified it as an easy system to extract information, Percoco told me.
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