Hotel and cyber threats
Hotels are now becoming a growing target for cyber criminals.
More worrying still, they are being targeted by nation-state adversary groups as well.
Hotels are vulnerable in all sorts of areas from stealing identities to pilfering credit card numbers via point-of-sale (POS) transactions
And according to Crowdstrike’s recent Global Threat report, they are also being vulnerable to cyber crooks tracking persons of interest while they are traveling, or enabling access to these potential victims when they use electronic devices outside the confines of protected networks.
Customers, including business travellers and large conferences with thousands of attendees, who are all travelling with valuable information assets, are all potential targets.
Business travellers and large conferences with thousands of attendees, who are all travelling with valuable information assets are also vulnerable.
Hotels are also regarded as soft targets because they don’t employ the most modern security practices.
Some key tips for hotels:
Supply chain protection: The hotel’s IT supply chain and partner networks are being increasingly targeted. Generally they have fewer security controls in place. Also hotels are now working with a number of suppliers. This increases the prospect of third party risk.
Next-generation antivirus (NGAV): They also have to watch out for next-generation anti-virus protection which will help them o detect and prevent malware on the PoS terminal. International hotel chains, in particular, are also a soft target when it comes to pilfering credit card numbers via point-of-sale transaction.
Identity and credential management: They also need identity and credential management to guard against default passwords, especially for hardware devices. These allow direct access to critical data.
Detection and threat hunting This means that any and all connections to the Internet from the hotel’s corporate environment need to be be monitored to identify data leaving the network. It also requires a team of expert threat hunters to help detect evidence of an incident. In particular, that means looking beyond malware.
9th July 2018
