Fix Your Risk

An important issue in contemporary times, when it comes to hotels, data security needs to be addressed even more diligently since it involves guests’ security and their privacy

- Bindu Gopal Rao

Most customers never give much though to the fact that hotels take so much of their personal data including their credit card details when they check in. That is probably because they have implicit trust in the hotel’s security practices when they volunteer this information.

However, if the thought every crossed their mind that this data could be compromised, would they be willing to part with it while checking in? Would they even want to stay in a hotel if they ever learn that it had suffered a data breach in the past?

Can you see how easily the spotlight has been firmly affixed on the data security systems implemented in hotels? And also why it is imperative for these to be robust, scalable and be able to thwart all kinds of potential attacks.

The hospitality industry has witnessed numerous sophisticated attacks on secured data including the recent breaches reported by InterContinental Hotels Group and Sabre Hospitality Solutions. It is not surprising, but hackers have usually targeted the payment card data information from different point-of-sales (POS) systems in hotels resulting in unauthorised credit card charges and other malicious activities.

Apart from the lack of POS encryption; hotel networks are often poorly defended in some cases allowing hackers to sit undetected on networks. The industry has witnessed also hackers increasingly moving to ransomware and extortion, a modus operandi that is spreading like wildfire in other industry sectors as well.

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