HotelChatter

Hotel Security / Tommy Lee / Hotel Computers / Hotel Hacks / Hotel Technology / Twitter / Hotel News / → All Tags

How to Prevent Tommy Lee from Hacking Your Twitter

Yesterday we noticed a funny item in Page Six. Apparently, New York Rangers hockey player Brad Richards had his Twitter account hacked by aging rocker Tommy Lee. Ok, so that's not really funny and you're probably wondering, "Why should I even care about these people?"

Well, what's really interesting here is HOW Tommy Lee hacked the Rangers' Twitter--through a hotel room computer.

Precisely, the in-suite computer at the Tribeca Grand. From Page Six:

Tampa native Richards stayed at the Tribeca Grand hotel and logged onto a computer in his room to tweet. When Lee stayed in the same room a few days later and booted up the computer, he saw Richards' account was still open and sent messages out under his handle. "Im a dork!" the rocker tweeted along with other messages before letting Richards in on the joke. "Signing out for ya!! I'm a nice hacker!!! hey dude btw . . . it's Tommy Lee!!! hahah!!"

more ›

Hotel Security / Destination Hotels and Resorts / Hotel Hacks / Austin Hotels / → All Tags

Destination Hotels Gets Hacked; Over 700 Credit Card Numbers Stolen

The longhorn hanging in the Driskill did not scare off hackers.

UPDATE 6.27.10: Destination Hotels issued a statement about this unfortunate situation. See bottom of story for what to do if you think you were a victim of credit card theft.

This is definitely not the sort of information you want to hear as you head into thwe weekend, especially if you've booked a room at Destination Hotels and Resorts.

The hotel collection was a victim of an intense database hack that lasted over three months, stole over 700 credit card numbers from guests and charged hundreds of thousands of dollars with the stolen info. ABC News reports:

The police said the security hole has been fixed but that the unknown criminals had access to the data for months.

"The losses right now are probably in the hundreds of thousands. I think each loss is averaging about two or three thousand dollars," said Austin Police Department Sgt. Matt Greer.

The stolen numbers were then being used overseas, mostly in Europe, Greer told ABC News.

"It's a result of somebody hacking into the system, not somebody at the hotel," he said.

more ›

Hotel Hacks / Wyndham Hotels / Hotel Crime / Hotel News Briefs / → All Tags

Why Can't Hotels Keep Our Information Safe From Hackers?

Budget Travel tweeted at us about hacking incident at Wyndham Hotels where guests' credit card information including names, credit card numbers and card expiration dates were stolen. This was the second time in recent years Wyndham has been hacked.

How does this happen? We would think that securing the computer systems at a hotel should be just as important as securing the guestrooms. Sadly, according to this report from BNET, hackers love to hack hotels because it's easy and because it can take several months for hotels to realized they've been hacked.

Making it worse is that much like the Hotel WiFi conundrum where most hotels are franchises owned by different owners and WiFi charges vary from hotel to hotel despite having the same brand name, there doesn't seem to be a uniform computer system to safeguard guest info.

Like we said, protecting our identities before and after we check-in to a hotel should be just as important as protecting us when we're inside the hotel room. Otherwise, we're paying cash!

more ›

Best Western Hotels / UK Hotels / European Hotels / Hotel Hacks / Hotel News / → All Tags

Best Western Europe Says Hacking Was Not Wide-Spread

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?