Trump Hotels caught up in data breach (again)
If you stayed at any of these hotels between August 2016 and March 2017, your credit card information may have been stolen.
The Trump International Hotel on its first day of business September 12, 2016 in Washington, DC.
Trump Hotels has suffered its third data breach in three years.
The company revealed in a statement on its website on Tuesday that it was caught in a cyberattack against Sabre Corp, which handles reservation systems for more than 36,000 properties.
Hackers behind the breach had access to a treasure trove of data, including credit card information, names, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and reservations. The breach hit 14 Trump Hotels properties, including ones in New York, Washington, DC, Las Vegas and Chicago.
Other victims of the breach include guests at Four Seasons, Hard Rock and Loews hotels. Hotel chains have become lucrative targets for hackers as they seek out insecure systems that have high payouts.
"This malware acts as a virtual skimmer, stealing card data as it is temporarily stored in memory and sending it to the criminal's servers," Corey Williams, a senior director at the security company Centrify, said in an emailed statement.
Sabre's investigation found that an unauthorized party accessed its payment and reservation systems between August 10, 2016, and March 9, 2017. The company began informing victims who had been hit with the data breach on June 5.
President Donald Trump is more than familiar with cyberattacks against his hotel business. It's become an annual tradition of sorts for Trump Hotels to announce it's suffered a breach. A 2016 breach let hackers steal customer credit card information. Eric Trump, the president's son, blamed that hack on "cyberterrorists" who wanted to hurt American businesses. In September, Trump agreed to pay a $50,000 fine after 2014 and 2015 data breaches at the hotel chain lead to more than 70,000 leaked credit card numbers.
Six of the Trump Hotels hit in the data breach from three years ago were repeat victims from the latest Sabre hack.
The majority of the attacks happened in November 2016, the same month Trump won the US presidential election. Trump Hotels in Washington, DC and Rio de Janeiro were both first breached on November 7, the day right before Election Day.
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