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Marriott lowers estimate of customers affected by breach to 383 million, says 8.6 million encrypted payment cards involved

Filip TRUȚĂ

January 07, 2019

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Marriott lowers estimate of customers affected by breach to 383 million, says 8.6 million encrypted payment cards involved

Following last year”s disclosure that hackers breached its systems, Marriot has released an update on the number of affected customers, the type of data that was leaked, as well as some changes to its practices and policies.

On Nov. 30, 2018, the world”s largest hotel chain issued an embarrassing notice that its servers were breached, leaving 500 million guest records in criminal wrong hands. With the help of internal and external forensics and analytics teams, Marriot now knows that the number of affected customers is lower – albeit still high, by any standards.

“Working closely with its internal and external forensics and analytics investigation team, Marriott determined that the total number of guest records involved in this incident is less than the initial disclosure,” Marriot says in the update, posted to its news center Friday. “Also, the number of payment cards and passport numbers involved is a relatively small percentage of the overall total records involved,” the hotel chain said.

According to the updated news release, Marriott now believes 383 million guests may have been affected, a number it refers to as “the upper limit” for the number of guest records involved in the incident. The number could be lower, Marriot says, considering that many guests have multiple records.

“The company has concluded with a fair degree of certainty that information for fewer than 383 million unique guests was involved, although the company is not able to quantify that lower number because of the nature of the data in the database,” it clarifies.

The investigation has brought to light several other details as well. For example, approximately 5.25 million unencrypted passport numbers and 20.3 million encrypted passport numbers were among the records accessed by the intruder. Investigators found no evidence that the master encryption key was accessed, but they haven”t ruled it out either. Guests can contact Marriott”s call center and ask reps to look up their passport number to see if and how they are affected.

Around 8.6 million encrypted payment cards were involved in the incident, including 354,000 that were unexpired as of September 2018. Again, Marriot believes hackers have not accessed either of the components needed to decrypt the encrypted payment card numbers, but investigators are not ruling out this scenario either. Notably, a small number of customers may be more affected than others because of the way Marriot encrypted some form fields while others were not subject to encryption. According to the notice:

“While the payment card field in the data involved was encrypted, Marriott is undertaking additional analysis to see if payment card data was inadvertently entered into other fields and was therefore not encrypted. Marriott believes that there may be a small number (fewer than 2,000) of 15-digit and 16-digit numbers in other fields in the data involved that might be unencrypted payment card numbers. The company is continuing to analyze these numbers to better understand if they are payment card numbers and, if they are payment card numbers, the process it will put in place to assist guests.”

Lastly, Marriot has discontinued the Starwood reservations database, and is now taking registrations solely through its own system. The breach, as readers might remember, occurred via Starwood”s servers, following Marriott”s acquisition of the leisure company in 2015.

Some say Chinese spies could be behind the Marriott breach, as part of a larger intelligence-gathering campaign targeting the U.S. and operated from Beijing.

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Filip TRUȚĂ

Filip has 15 years of experience in technology journalism. In recent years, he has turned his focus to cybersecurity in his role as Information Security Analyst at Bitdefender.

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