Anyone even tangentially connected to the cybersecurity world won’t be surprised to hear about the latest data breach. Frankly, at the rate these types of attacks and breaches are occurring, it should come as no surprise to anyone who’s as much as read a paper or browsed an online news site recently that high profile breaches keep happening. It’s gotten to the point where it’s becoming “not if, but when” – not if they’ll be breached, but when. And, increasingly, how often.
The latest incident to hit the news involves yet another major corporation, once again in the hospitality industry. Omni Hotels and Resorts has reportedly admitted to a major breach of its point-of-sale, or PoS, systems. Not all of the company’s properties were affected by the malware, which seems to have targeted payment card information, but enough were affected to have the company acknowledge that it’s treating the discovery as a serious problem.
The organization has 60 properties; at the time of this writing, it is still not known how many of those locations were affected by the breach. Although investigators have been assigned to the case, it is still too early in the investigation to determine exactly how many customers were affected.
“The malware was designed to collect certain payment card information, including cardholder name, credit/debit card number, security code and expiration date,” the official Omni statement said. At this time there is no evidence that other customer data, such as contact information, Social Security numbers or PINs, had been compromised, according to the statement.
When contacting its customers, Omni emphasized that even if they had used their cards at any of the affected hotel properties, their information may very well not have been compromised. However, they did advise their customers to carefully review and monitor the statements for cards they’d used at any Omni location between December 23, 2015 and June 14, 2016.
Along with the emerging threats associated with the Internet of Things, (or IoT), we’re seeing a big surge in PoS cybercrime. Hackers are continually evolving new strategies to steal data from payment cards, whether at ATMs through skimming or through devices or systems that steal from magnetic-stripe cards at cash registers. There are solutions to stop the madness, however, or at least slow the incredible spread of these incidents. Payment cards with chips, rather than magnetic stripes, for example, are a strong deterrent, as they require both the chip AND a PIN, which is finally putting two-factor authentication into widespread use. “Chip cards” are prevalent in Europe and Canada, and are now making inroads, rather belatedly, in the American market.
If you’re involved in protecting a point of sale business, look into solutions that maintain the sanctity of the data sent out from the systems themselves, such as Comodo’s Securebox and Advanced Endpoint Protection.
Sadly, until more of the cyber security world chooses to “Join The Fight” against malware, we can all, unfortunately, expect to see more and more stories like this one making headlines.
