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Best Western Hotels

Best Western Europe Says Hacking Was Not Wide-Spread

August 26, 2008 at 4:08 PM | 0 Comments

Yesterday a news report said that the computer reservations system for Best Western Europe had been hacked and detailed guest information had been sold to the Russian mob.

While many guests probably had a sleepless night worrying that someone named Vlad or Tatiana was going to take over their lives, Best Western today issued a statement that the initial hacking report is "largely erroneous."

We can confirm that on August 21, 2008, three separate attempts were made via a single log-on ID to access the same data from a single hotel. The hotel in question is the 107-room Best Western Hotel am Schloss Kopenick in Berlin, Germany, where a Trojan horse virus was detected by the hotel's anti-virus software. The compromised log-in ID permitted access to reservations data for that property only. The log-in ID was immediately terminated, and the computer in question has been removed from use.

We can also confirm that we have been able to narrow down the number of customers affected by this breach to ten. We are currently contacting those customers and offering assistance as needed.

The statement from BW also said that the computer reservations system purges data from guests seven days after departure. This is definitely reassuring but does this mean they don't keep our pillow preferences on file?