After fining British Airways with a record fine of £183 million earlier this week, the UK’s data privacy regulator is now planning to slap world’s biggest hotel chain Marriott International with a £99 million ($123 million) fine under GDPR over 2014 data breach.
This is the second major penalty notice in the last two days that hit companies for failing to protect its customers’ personal and financial information compromised and implement adequate security measures.
In November 2018, Marriott discovered that unknown hackers compromised their guest reservation database through its Starwood hotels subsidiary and walked away with personal details of approximately 339 million guests.
The compromised database leaked guests’ names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.
The breach, which likely happened in 2014, also exposed unencrypted passport numbers for at least 5 million users and credit card records of eight million customers.
According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), nearly 30 million residents of 31 countries in the European and 7 million UK residents were impacted by the Marriott data breach.
The ICO’s investigation found that Marriott failed to undertake sufficient due diligence when it bought Starwood and should also have done more to secure its systems.
Last year, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in Europe that forces companies to make sure the way they collect, process, and store data are safe.
images from Hacker News
Recent Comments