The hackers have been stealing data related to either credit cards or the bank accounts from a number of big companies including Home Depot, CVS Photo, Michaels, Albertson’s, SuperValu, Staples, Target, P.F. Chang’s and Neiman Marcus. This time, it’s the chain of Trump hotels across Canada and the United States.
Hackers were successful again in sneaking their malicious virus into the Trump hotels system and hence stealing all the credit card details of the customers. It’s been studied that the hackers somehow managed to hide the virus inside the whole computer system at Trump hotels for a quite long time. The officials at the hotel have acknowledged their website to be infected by the virus.
After a lot of investigation, the customers have been warned by the authorities of the hotel chain that whoever visited the hotel between May 19, 2014 and June 2, 2015, may have the possibility of being affected. The list of affected hotels is from two locations in New York and one from each of the other cities including Honolulu, Toronto, Las Vegas, Chicago and Miami.
According to the authorities at Trump hotels, hackers placed some very powerful software in their computer system. This malware, unlike other malware, does not infect the computers immediately. It gradually takes its toll by touching the most sensitive information like credit card numbers, security codes or the CVV number at the back of cards and expiration dates of cards.
Company said:
An independent forensic investigation has not conclusively determined that any particular customer’s payment card information was taken.
It seems that, whenever a customer or hotel employee typed in payment information in their system, the malware silently grabbed all the sensitive payment information in the background. Till now the company isn’t very sure whether the hackers managed to pull out the payment information from their network of the system.
It has not been determined yet by the investigators that whether any customer’s payment information was stolen or not. The hotel chain has decided to offer one year of free identity fraud protection to all the affected customers. Since credit cards nowadays are already fraud protected, this is not going to benefit any of the victims.
In the recent years, hacking has been increasingly high. According to Kevin Watson, CEO, the worldwide data networks are continuously under threat. The bigger the name, the bigger is the toll rate. The biggest example is The Trump hotel chain whose name has put it into a big trouble.
