California to close data breach notification loopholes under new law

California, which has some of the strongest data breach notification laws in the U.S., thinks it can do even better. The golden state’s attorney general Xavier Becerra announced a new bill Thursday that aims to close loopholes in its existing data breach notification laws by expanding the requirements for companies to notify users or customers […]

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Marriott now lets you check if you’re a victim of the Starwood hack

Hotel chain giant Marriott will now let you check if you’re a victim of the Starwood hack. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it has put in place “a mechanism to enable guests to look up individual passport numbers to see if they were included in the set of unencrypted passport numbers.” That follows a statement […]

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A new Congress means a new opportunity for consumer privacy protections

Debra Berlyn Contributor Share on Twitter Debra Berlyn is the president of Consumer Policy Solutions and the executive director of Project GOAL, a project to raise awareness of both the benefits and challenges of innovative new technologies for the aging community. The 2018 mid-term elections, for the first time in U.S. history, resulted in a […]

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Why do hotels collect passport data anyway?

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Benjamin Braddock begins his affair with Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate by nervously checking into a hotel under the name Mr. Gladstone. After all, in our cultural imagination, booking a room in a hotel is a refuge for anonymity, and often, the vice that comes along with it. But that’s certainly not the case today — if it ever was, beyond the silver screen.

On Friday, Marriott provided an update on the 4-years-long data breach of its Starwood database announced in November. In the breach, hackers were able to access the *unencrypted* passport numbers of more than 5 million hotel guests.

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It’s increasingly looking like China was behind the massive Marriott data hack

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All signs point to China when it comes to the massive Marriott hack that came to light last month.

The data breach that exposed personal data of around 500 million guests of the hotel chain is believed to part of a Chinese state-run espionage operation, according to multiple sources briefed on the U.S. government’s investigation that spoke with the New York Times and Washington Post

The intrusion into Marriott International’s Starwood hotel reservation system shared similarities to previous Chinese-government linked intelligence gathering operations. The hackers in the Marriott hotel chain breach used the same cloud hosting service that previous Chinese cyber attacks utilized. The sources familiar with the U.S. investigation also point out that similar techniques, such as server “hopping,” lead to the belief that China is behind the hack.  Read more…

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Marriott’s poor data breach response is putting victims at risk of phishing

Last Thursday, Marriott sent out millions of emails warning of a massive data breach — some 500 million guest reservations had been stolen from its Starwood database. One problem: the email sender’s domain didn’t look like it came from Marriott at all. Marriott sent its notification email from “email-marriott.com,” which is registered to a third […]

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Marriott says 500 million Starwood guest records stolen in massive data breach

Starwood Hotels has confirmed its hotel guest database of about 500 million customers has been stolen in a data breach. The hotel and resorts giant said in a statement filed with U.S. regulators that the “unauthorized access” to its guest database was detected on or before September 10 — but may have dated back as far […]

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