Chinese Hotel Breach May Have Hit 100 Million+ Customers

The Chinese police officers are investigating about a possible data breach at a major hotel group which might have affected over 100 million customers.

Shanghai’s Changning District police who confirmed on Tuesday that it was called out by Huazhu Group which operates more than 3000 hotels in hundreds of cities, who is running 18 major brands that includes the foreign chains Mercure and Ibis hotels etc.

The incident shown up when a dark web vendor that put the stolen data from group up for sale for only eight Bitcoins ($55,600).

Mobile Phishing Campaign Offered Free Flights

The state media who claimed that over 500 million records were stolen by this breach. These confidential stolen data that includes the 123 million registration details includes names, mobile numbers and ID Numbers; 130 million check-in records including names, addresses and date of births and 240 million hotel stays records that including the car and mobile numbers.

The CyberSecurity Intelligence firm Zibao who reportedly suggested that the breach might have occurred when the hotel’s developers uploaded the database to GitHub.

Andy Norton, the director of threat intelligence at Lastline, who speculated that the attackers in this case may not be experienced at all.

“It looks like human error is to blame for this huge breach. It also look like that the threat actors selling the data don’t have the contacts or infrastructure to monetize the stolen IDs individually,” he explained. “It could be that speculative Google dorking resulted in a script kiddie holding this data and trying to sell it.”

Tim Macke, the technical evangelist at Synopsys, he added that if GitHub rumors are that true the hack appears to be in the same opportunistic mold as the last year’s Uber breach.

“Development teams using the public source code systems like GitHub and public continuous integration (CI) system like Travis-CI need to recognize that any developer activity which cases a push to a public repository or a public branch can be viewed by others,” he said.

“The increasing popularity of hosted development tools like GitHub, Jira and Travis-CI make them ideal sources of information for malicious actors.”

If there are any EU citizen’s data amongst the trove it will be amazing and interesting to see how the China reacts to a possible GDPR investigation.