Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants is investigating reports of a data breach at several of its properties.
Kimpton operates 62 boutique hotels across the country and has begun to look into the scale of this hacking. Management has hired a computer security firm to find out if guest information or internal systems have been hacked. The hotel group has been discreetly advising guests who recently stayed at Kimpton to monitor their credit card bills and immediately notify their banks of unauthorized charges.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Kimpton released a statement that said, in part, “Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants takes the protection of payment card data very seriously. Kimpton was recently made aware of a report of unauthorized charges occurring on cards that were previously used legitimately at Kimpton properties.” Kimpton says it is doing everything it can to resolve the matter. They do offer customers some small solace about fraudulent charges to customer accounts. “Payment card network rules generally state that cardholders are not responsible for such charges.”
One computer blog has reported finding multiple sources in the financial industry ready to confirm a pattern of fraudulent credit card processing, suggesting a data breach at somewhere in the vicinity of two dozen Kimpton hotels.
The hotel chain is not the only hotel to find itself on the wrong end of a data breach. Over the last year, a number of hotel chains, including Trump, Starwood, and Hilton, found themselves victim to cyber criminals with customers’ information stolen. Omni Hotels had 50,000 credit card numbers taken.
Reportedly, most of the incidents appear to have occurred at counters with POS systems, including gift shops, restaurants and stores, but there were also complex data breaches that accessed information through internal data systems.
These breaches only reinforce the need for strong security measures to avoid even the smallest data breach. From merchant services to POS, cyber criminals are working as fast as possible to breach security technology as developers are finding ways to fortify defenses. From patches and upgrades to better firewalls, everyone should be protecting their data which is always at risk.
