The Hospitality Industry Needs a Security Wake Up Call. Will the HEI Hotel & Resorts Hack Be It? | GlobeSt.com - 0 views
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HEI has reported that 20 hotels that it operates in the US may have been targeted by hackers seeking customers’ credit card information. Determining how many and which customers might have had their data stolen is difficult; HEI only discovered the breach in June and it is possible that the malware may have been active since March 1, 2015 in some systems
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The hotels ranged from Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, and Intercontinental flags and were located in Florida, Texas, Vermont, Chicago, Ill., Arlington, Va., California, Nashville, Tenn., Minneapolis, Minn., Colorado, Washington, DC and Philadelphia
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“The current business model of hotels and their franchisees does not provide cyber security as one of the deliverables provided to their licensees,” he said. “Along this same line, the types of equipment/software used by the properties, software patching, and monitoring are woefully inadequate for today’s threats.”
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This article talks about the recent hack of HEI Hotel & Resorts that occurred in June of this year, where 20 HEI-operated hotels were breached via their POS system. The malware had been discovered in June but the company reported that it could have been active since March 1st, 2015 in some systems. The article also talks about how POS systems are common targets for hacking and goes on to mention some of the other recent cybersecurity risks that have occurred in the industry, where their POS systems were the targets of hacking. The American Hotel & Lodging Association met with a group of other associations to discuss the issues of cybersecurity and look for possible solutions. However, the industry has not taken measures to amplify their security, probably due to the history with certain IT standards, the cost of starting over, and potential privacy issues. The article claims that, overall, the industry has not done much to change the inherent security risks with regards to technology.