Banks: Card Thieves Hit White Lodging Again
The White Lodging Service Corporations run the Marriott, a hotel franchise. The breach was first reported on January 31, 2015, but was not confirmed until three days later by Merrillville (Ind. based company). The breached occurred at 14 locations nationwide and it was a result of malicious software being installed on cash registers. Credit card breach is estimated to have been going on for nine months. Financial institutions have found a pattern of counterfeit card frauds, all of which had led back to Marriott locations. Banks have traced the compromised cards back to many Marriott locations nationwide, including Austin, Texas, Bedford Park, Ill., Denver, Indianapolis, and Louisville, Kentucky. White Lodging spokesperson Kathleen Sebastian spoke publicly that they corporation has consulted a security firm to investigate, but they had found nothing to confirm that there was a breach.
Despite not finding any evidence of the breach, White Lodging has made numerous security updates. They installed a third-party managed firewall system, dual-factor authentication for critical systems, and more. They don't want to reveal all of their security updates to the public, which is also part of their security protocol. One of the measures that they are taking is tokenizing all of their systems, especially their registers. Tokenization is a process where the card information is substituted with placeholder information, this makes the card data useless for hackers. Tokenization is the most attractive system for businesses that are within the 1-3 level. It's not completely safe through, in fact, it has caused an increase in retail card breaches, attackers installing malware on point-of-sale devices.
Another way to protect your devices is point-to-point encryption, which is a bit more expensive and complicated than tokenization, but it is more secure. Businesses go with tokenization because it means that they don't have to install card readers and other technology. Point-to-point encryption uses the card readers to make sure that the card information is never in plain text. Many merchants are now installing card readers because they need to be able to read chip cards, used by Europay, MasterCard and Visa. Chip cards are more secure and are more difficult and expensive to counterfeit. This came about after the hacks at Target and Home Depot, which involved magnetic-stripe based cards.
I like this article because not only does it give you information on the breach, it tells you different ways merchants and credit card companies try to prevent credit card fraud. Although White Lodging said they never got confirmation on a breach, they could be lying because they don't want people to avoid staying at their hotel. I'll keep a look out for any more breaches at Marriott locations, and I hope that they discover who is responsible for the breach. The best thing that the public can do is keep an eye on their credit card bills and make sure that the credit card association that they have chip cards and not magnetic-stripe based cards.
[Source] ~ (February 5, 2015)
