Starwood Hotels’ database hacked and 500 million guests’ information compromised

Cyber-attacks seem to be getting ever more audacious with each passing year. The newest high profile victim of these attacks is one of the largest chains of luxury hotels in the world, namely, Starwood Hotels. In one of the largest ever thefts of information, Starwood Hotels reported that the breach has compromised over 500 million guest records. The specifics of the attack are yet to be disclosed, however, in a mandatory disclosure, the hospitality giant reported that the unauthorized access was detected before the 10th of September. Marriott International, the parent company of Starwood Hotels claimed that the illegal access to their database may have occurred as far back as 2014. But, the corporation recently discovered that the hackers had copied all the sensitive information.

Adding to the security woes, of the 500 million guest records taken, about 327 million of them had complete information about guests, such as postal address, phone number, gender, passport information, email address, travel information and so on. What’s worse is that an unknown number of records even contained credit card information. A spokesperson for Marriott said that the company was cooperating with authorities and was in process of recovering the information.

Starwood Hotels was established in 1969 and manages over 1,200 hotels, resorts or spas and was one of the largest chains of hotels in the world. In 2015, Marriott International purchased Starwood for $13.6 billion. The resulting entity became the largest chain of hotels in the world.