Secure &connected connected
A single, expertly crafted phishing email could trigger a full-scale cybersecurity breach at a major hotel, and the repercussions – from credential theft at the front desk through to the extraction of
could do irreparable damage to the brand. Jim Banks analyses the threats and possible safeguards.
Into the breach W
hen we think of large-scale cyberattacks, it is easy to imagine that criminals will go after the big banks, not an individual hotel. Surely,
they want to go after the money, right? Not exactly. These days, data is just as valuable as cash, and any large hotel operation has masses of high-value data. A few years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers identified in its ‘Hotel Outlook’ report that the hospitality industry was victim to the second-largest number of cyberattacks of any sector between 2018 and 2022. Thieves are after highly sensitive personal information that hotels hold on their guests, as well as vast amounts of financial data and transaction histories, and they know that a hotel’s connections to international data servers offer a possible route into a wider data ecosystem with even more treasure. Furthermore, cybercriminals know that hotels have a large attack surface with many potential vulnerabilities. Hotels utilise many connected technologies to ensure that they deliver a seamless guest experience – from automated check-in kiosks
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and digital keycards to smart in-room systems. Then there are the many guest connections to the internet that open potential fissures in the firewall. According to IBM’s figures for 2023, the average cost of a hospitality data breach was $3.36m – 14% higher than the previous year. As the tools available to cybercriminals become increasingly sophisticated, the number of attacks is set to rise, as is their success rate, unless the industry shrugs off its habit of being slow to respond to the potentially dire consequences of cybercrime.
Clear and present danger
Back in 2023, a report by cybersecurity and managed security services provider Trustwave showed that more than 30% of hospitality organisations had reported a data breach at some point in their lifetime. Of those that had been successfully attacked, almost 90% had suffered a breach in their security systems more than once in a year. Make no mistake: cybercrime is a real threat, and there are plenty
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