Marriott's guest reservation database breached, data of 500 million guests impacted

Marriott International group manages more than 6,700 properties in 30 leading hotel brands spanning 129 countries and territories. Today, Marriott revealed a data security incident involving the Starwood guest reservation database. Marriott has confirmed that there was unauthorized access to the database. And the database contains information on up to approximately 500 million guests who made a reservation at a Starwood property.

The database contains the following information on guests:

• For approximately 327 million of these guests, the information includes some combination of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.
• For some, the information also includes payment card numbers and payment card expiration dates, but the payment card numbers were encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard encryption (AES-128). There are two components needed to decrypt the payment card numbers, and at this point, Marriott has not been able to rule out the possibility that both were taken.
• For the remaining guests, the information was limited to name and sometimes other data such as mailing address, email address, or other information.

Marriott is working with law enforcement agencies to investigate this incident.

You can learn more about this security breach here.