Marriott Says 500 million Starwood Guest Records Stolen in Massive Data Breach (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Starwood Hotels has confirmed its hotel guest database of about 500 million customers has been stolen in a data breach. The hotel and resorts giant said in a statement filed with U.S. regulators that the "unauthorized access" to its guest database was detected on or before September 10 -- but may have dated back as far as 2014. "Marriott learned during the investigation that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014," said the statement. "Marriott recently discovered that an unauthorized party had copied and encrypted information, and took steps towards removing it."

Specific details of the breach remain unknown. We've contacted Starwood for more and will update when we hear back. The company said hat it obtained and decrypted the database on November 19 and "determined that the contents were from the Starwood guest reservation database." Some 327 million records contained a guest's name, postal address, phone number, date of birth, gender, email address, passport number, Starwood's rewards information (including points and balance), arrival and departure information, reservation date, and their communication preferences.

Comments

Re:My question is...

[enjar]

It's pretty routine information for a hotel to have on file. Imagine you were running a hotel ... what would you want to know about your customers?

• When they are coming. You need to know how many rooms are booked to schedule staff, etc.
• Who they are so you can verify them when they show up (name, address, DOB, etc)
• How to contact them if you need to. For example, a water pipe bursts making the hotel uninhabitable and you need to let them know.
• Passport number would be important for international visitors (and might be required by law)
• Past reservation history allows you to alert them of sales, promotions, discounts for a place they have stayed a lot
• Rewards number and balance is necessary for room upgrades, etc

Re:Oopsie

[DarkRookie2]

Their problem not mine.
Either secure your shit with modern tools, or burn down the current system completely and start from scratch.

These will not stop happening unless some punishment is added.