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A zero-trust IT policy can help hotels mitigate their technological vulnerability while augmenting overall protection and enabling smart segmentation of data

- PRANITA BHONSALE

As if the blow dealt from the pandemic was not hard enough, hotels are dealing with a growing threat from cybercriminals. This data leakage could damage their reputation in addition to causing serious financial damage. Guests would hesitate re-visiting hotels that failed to protect sensitive information including their names, surnames, ID numbers, credit card information and addresses.

According to a recent Akamai report, the hospitality, travel and retail sectors are being bombarded with malicious cyberattacks. 63 billion credential stuffing and four billion web application attacks took place in these industries in the past two years. Cybercriminals especially tap loyalty programmes, which are a potential goldmine for them.

“Some top loyalty programmes targeted require nothing more than a mobile number and a numeric password, while others rely on easily obtained information as a means of authentication. There is an urgent need for better identity controls and countermeasures to prevent attacks against APIs and server resources,” said Steve Ragan, Akamai Security Researcher and report’s author.

This April, the Mira Bhayandar-Vasai Virar crime unit busted a pan-India online racket, involving booking of suites in five-star hotels. The criminals used stolen data of credit cards, which they sourced from the darknet.

According to Munish Pande, IT Head, Roseate Hotels & Resorts, the pandemic has presented unscrupulous cyber criminals and state actors with a new and topical leverage to increase the profitability of successfully exploiting their targets through fear and misinformation. “Thousands of new potentially suspicious domains are created daily and there has been a large shift towards phishing campaigns exploiting the public’s thirst for information related to the pandemic,” he noted.