Can You Pass That Data, Please?

Given the frequency at which data breaches are being reported in the hospitality industry, it is time to tighten the grid

- Pradeep Suvarna

Data breaches in the hospitality industry are unfortunately turning out to be a regular affair and not many are surprised by this turn of affairs. For the longest time, hotels and resorts have been in the cross hairs of cyber criminals and hackers because they have a gold mine of information that they gather from their guests. This is right from their personal data to credit card details.

What’s more, many of these guests are not just your plain Joe and Jane, but high-profile people and their personal information can be the proverbial El Dorado for the paparazzi. Is it any surprise then that hotels are always the soft target for cyber attacks?

Talking about this, Amit Bhattacharjee, IT manager at Bengaluru Marriott Hotel Whitefield said that the main motive for cyber criminals and hackers to target hotels is to that it is easier f them to extract confidential information without being identified. “With the existing business expansions, we see a huge number of corporate travellers staying in hotels for various reasons like meetings, events or project planning. These business executives make enticing targets for hackers as they can get all the required information regarding the corporate assets with a simple malware packet disguised as genuine software, which is sent to their device through the internet. Once installed, these software are capable of scanning through the system and sending the data back to the originator, which can then be used in anyway desired.”