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It was all smiles when Marriott acquired Starwood in 2016


Marriott reveals major cyberattack on Starwood


HOTEL GROUP SUFFERS A MASSIVE BREACH OF ITS CUSTOMERS’ DATA. IAN TAYLOR REPORTS


The world’s largest hotel group Marriott has suffered a massive data breach with the loss of personal data of up to 500 million guests of its Starwood Hotels’ brands.


The breach includes the data of an unknown number of UK customers to whom Marriott is offering a year’s free subscription to a cybersecurity monitoring service. The company began contacting customers by email last Friday when it announced the breach. Marriott said it received a


80travelweekly.co.uk6 December 2018


security alert on September 8 and determined on November 19 that hackers had acquired data from the Starwood database. It revealed the hackers breached


Starwood’s system four years ago, accessing the data of 327 million guests – including encrypted payment card numbers and dates of expiry – and creating a file with the data of 170 million customers. Marriott was this week investigating whether this was in addition to the stolen data. The group said it could not rule


out the possibility that encryption keys had also been stolen. Marriott completed the


$13.6 billion acquisition of Starwood in September 2016. Starwood reported a breach of point-of-sale systems in some of its hotels just four days after the deal was announced in November 2015, leading analysts to suggest the hackers should have been detected then. The Starwood brands include


W Hotels, St Regis, Sheraton, Westin, Le Méridien, The Luxury Collection and Design Hotels. A Marriott spokesperson said:


“All involved would have preferred this to have been detected earlier.”


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