Fergie's Tech Blog

Cyber Crime Checks Into The Hotel Industry

Andy Greenberg writes on Forbes.com:

Over the past year America's hotels have had some uninvited guests: a wave of increasingly sophisticated invasions by organized cybercriminals.

That's one finding of a report that cybersecurity researcher Nicholas Percoco plans to present Tuesday at the Black Hat security conference in Arlington, Va. His data shows a spike in hacking incidents that successfully targeted hotels and resorts, what Percoco describes as relatively unprotected sources of thousands or even millions of credit card account details.

Percoco, who works as a security auditor and data breach investigator for the security firm Trustwave, plans to outline the results of around 1,900 audits and 200 breach investigations that his company performed over the last year. The central anomaly in that data: While only 3% of the audits Trustwave performed proactively for companies were commissioned by the hospitality industry, hotels and resorts were victims in 38% of investigations following successful cybercriminal attacks. That's a new phenomenon for Trustwave, whose hospitality breach investigations were "practically nonexistent" in 2008, says Percoco.

posted by Fergie @ 2/02/2010 02:28:00 PM