More than a month after Marriott International announced the largest data breach in history, the hotel company provided an update on Jan. 4 that highlighted new numbers as to the amount of guests whose information was compromised.
The original estimate in November was that 500 million Starwood guests were believed to have had their information compromised, but that number has been lowered to about 383 million. While that may be good news, the company also admitted that there were approximately 5.25 million unencrypted passport numbers included in the breach in addition to the 20.3 million encrypted passport numbers already reported. As far as encrypted credit cards go, approximately 8.6 million were compromised (354,000 of which were unexpired as of September 2018).
Marriott claims that “there is no evidence that the unauthorized third party accessed either of the components needed to decrypt the payment card numbers.” Same goes for the passport numbers.
“As we near the end of the cyber forensics and data analytics work, we will continue to work hard to address our customers’ concerns and meet the standard of excellence our customers deserve and expect from Marriott,” says Marriott’s President and CEO Arne Sorenson.
Meeting planners who have been affected can turn to the company’s dedicated website and call center for questions about the incident.
