The parent company, Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), has published a tool for visitors to check if hotels they stayed at are among those affected, as well as, offering its franchised properties a free examination by an outside computer forensic team and stated, “”But not all property owners have been anxious to take the company up on that offer. As a consequence, there may be more breached hotel locations yet to be added to the state look-up tool.”
Krebs on Security points out that this is just the tip of the iceberg and reports, “Card-stealing cyber thieves have broken into some of the largest hotel chains over the past few years. Hotel brands that have acknowledged card breaches over the last year after prompting by KrebsOnSecurity include Kimpton Hotels, Trump Hotels (twice), Hilton, Mandarin Oriental, and White Lodging (twice). Card breaches also have hit hospitality chains Starwood Hotels and Hyatt. In many of those incidents, thieves planted malicious software on the point-of-sale devices at restaurants and bars inside of the hotel chains. Point-of-sale based malware has driven most of the credit card breaches over the past two years…”