Slashdot Mirror
Best Western Loses Details On 8 Million Customers
Albanach writes "Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper has an exclusive report that the Best Western hotel chain has lost the personal details of each and every guest who has stayed at any of its 1300 hotels in the past 12 months. This amounts to details on 8 million customers and includes information such as name, address, credit card details and employment details. The data even includes future booking details, causing speculation that homes could be targeted for burglary when it's anticipated they will be unoccupied. A Best Western spokesperson is quoted as saying 'Best Western took immediate action to disable the compromised log-in account in question. We are currently in the process of working with our credit card partners to ensure that all relevant procedural standards are met, and that the interests of our guests are protected.'"
The summary is misleading:
The details wern't "Lost", the server was comprimised and they were stolen.
This doesn't affect all Best Western hotels, just some European ones.
The details stolen are from 2007-2008 (up to 20 months)
Well for brits, Continental means European except British.
Replying to myself, I just checked Wikipedia. Best Western has 4,000 hotels world-wide, 2,000 of which in North America. This means that the 1,312 hotels affected are probably all in continental Europe.
We British do consider ourselves to be European. A minority of xenophobes in Britain consider themselves not to be European (or realise they are and would prefer not to be) and an even smaller number don't even consider themselves (or want to be) part of Britain - they are Scottish, Irish, Welsh or English in their eyes. I consider myself Scottish, British and European, and almost everyone I have met with an intelligence regard themselves in the same way.