Marriott Hotel Chain Has Another Data Breach

Hotel giant Marriott International has confirmed that it has been hit again by a data breach. This time, an unknown attacker broke into one of the company’s facilities and stole 20 GB of data.

It is reported that the hacker managed to compromise only one of the numerous objects of the company, namely the BWI Airport Marriott, and the attacker retained network access for only about six hours. The company emphasizes that the hack did not affect the main Marriott network, and the hacker gained access to only one device.

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Although the company does not disclose anything about the stolen data, according to DataBreaches, about 20 GB of information was stolen during the incident. The files mainly contained non-confidential internal business documents, as well as some bank card information. So far, Marriott has not specified whether the attacker stole data belonging to hotel guests or its employees.

The company confirmed that after the attack, the hacker tried to extort money, otherwise threatening to leak the stolen files to the network. Marriott reported that it “did not make any payments and did not provide anything to the attacker,” but has already notified the FBI about the incident and hired a third-party information security company to investigate the incident.

Representatives of the hotel giant add that they will soon notify the relevant regulatory authorities and about 300-400 victims of the incident.

Let me remind you that this is the third Marriott-related data leak in recent years. So, in 2018, it became known that the hotel chain made a large-scale leak that affected, as it was initially thought, half a billion people. And although it later became known that the leak affected “only” 383 million guests, the hackers still spent almost four years in the company’s systems.