Sabre Corp has issued a warning to customers of a data breach which may have compromised payment card data and customer details.
Sabre says the breach affected its SynXis Enterprise Platform which hosts about 36,000 properties via its property management and central reservations system.
“We are investigating an incident involving unauthorized access to payment information contained in a subset of hotel reservations processed through the Sabre Hospitality Solutions SynXis Central Reservation system,” the company said in a SEC filing.
Sabre gave no immediate details about when the breach began or how many properties were affected.
“There is no reason to believe that any other Sabre systems beyond SynXis Central Reservations have been affected,” said Sabre spokesman Timothy Enstice.
“Our Sabre Hospitality Solutions customers are being notified of the investigation with a commitment to keep them informed. We have dedicated internal staff and independent cyber experts to complete this investigation as quickly as possible.”
The hospitality industry is still seen as a relatively soft target, especially through on site PoS sytems in hotels themselves, which have been easily compromised through malware attacks.
Intercontinental Hotels Group last month reported a data breach affecting more than 1,200 hotels, while other firms such as Hilton, Hyatt Hotels, Omni Hotels & Resorts, Starwood Hotels and Trump Hotels have been hit in recent years.
Ken Spinner, VP of field engineering for data protection firm Varonis Systems said it’s ‘too easy for data to be stolen’.
“This is the most recent attack in a string of incidents targeting payment information systems, a threat vector that continues to be an issue and highly targeted by attackers on the hunt for easy financial gain from stolen credit card info,” he said.
“While we don’t know the specifics of who had unauthorised access to the information and what tactics were used, we’ve seen from similar attacks that hackers gain access with co-opted credentials of someone with too much access.
“The attack on Hyatt earlier this year is a perfect example of hackers gaining access to payment systems by exploiting excessive employee permissions.
“Whether the data loss is caused by an insider threat or an external attack, it’s clear organisations need to understand where their information assets are, who is using them and who is responsible for them so they can detect malicious activity before it becomes a massive loss, such as the 32,000 hotels and other lodging establishments potentially jeopardised in this case.”
