Marriott, which suffered a huge loss of 1.3 billion in half a year, was fined 160 million for leaking customer data

Text | AI Finance News Chen Fang

Editor | Sun Jing

There has been new progress in the leakage of customer information by Marriott International Hotels. Recently, the British Information Commissioner The office fined Marriott ￡18.4 million (approximately 160 million yuan) for failing to protect customers' personal data.

As the world's largest hotel group, Marriott International Hotel Group, which is positioned as a high-end luxury hotel, owns more than 30 hotel brands such as Marriott, Starwood, Sheraton, and Ritz-Carlton. The cause of this fine It was Starwood Hotels that leaked the personal information of 339 million guests two years ago, including names, phone numbers, dates of birth, gender, etc.

The initially exposed data was 500 million, which was later confirmed to be 339 million after investigation. It is understood that the reason for the leakage of Marriott customers' personal information was a cyber attack. As early as 2014, hackers implanted code and software into the hotel system to gain remote access and steal the data in the database. Marriott did not disclose the data until four years later. Found this problem.

The original penalty imposed on Marriott by the British Information Commissioner's Office was 99.2 million pounds. However, taking into account the measures taken by Marriott after the problem occurred to reduce the risk of damage to customers, the fine was finally reduced to 18.4 million pounds. GBP.

Despite this, Marriott did not learn its lesson. At the end of March 2020, Marriott experienced another customer information leak. The personal information of approximately 5.2 million hotel customers was leaked, involving names, contact information, addresses, dates of birth, preferences, etc. However, unlike the last cyber attack, the source this time is an “insider”.

Marriott said that at the end of February this year, the company discovered that two employee accounts had obtained a large amount of customer information. This illegal operation began in mid-January and lasted for more than a month. Due to the information leakage, Marriott is now involved in lawsuits. Some users and lawyers have decided to sue Marriott for a claim amount of up to 12.5 billion US dollars. It is understood that Marriott is facing lawsuits in the United States, Canada and other places.

It is worth noting that Marriott is not the only company that has experienced customer information leakage incidents. Similar incidents have also occurred at giants such as MGM Hotels and Hilton Hotels.

In this regard, industry insiders analyze that information leakage incidents occur frequently in the hotel industry. First, there are many hotel system interfaces and improper management, which may be invaded. Second, the hotel industry is short of IT talents and the treatment is relatively low. It is too low to retain talents and creates hidden dangers for information security. The reason why hackers like to attack hotel companies is related to the fact that most of their customers are high-net-worth individuals. The resale of their information is very valuable, allowing them to obtain considerable profits.

It is understood that the 500 million pieces of information previously leaked by Huazhu were sold at a high price of 370,000 yuan. According to industry insiders, buying 10,000 telephone numbers of a high-net-worth individual on the black market costs several thousand yuan. However, the hotel's customer data is more comprehensive, the information is more valuable, and the selling price is higher.

Although frequent incidents of customer information leakage indicate that there are huge loopholes in Marriott's management, it ultimately gives "careful people" an opportunity to take advantage of it. But obviously, Marriott can't care about these at the moment, and how to survive has become its primary goal.

Affected by the global epidemic, Marriott’s performance this year was not satisfactory. Revenue in the first half of the year was US$6.145 billion, a sharp decline of 40.44% year-on-year. Net profit even turned from profit to loss, with a loss of US$203 million (approximately RMB 1.36 billion). billion). In response to the crisis, Marriott has taken various measures to reduce costs, including cutting executive salaries by 50%, laying off employees, and closing stores.

It is understood that there are more than 4,000 employees at the Marriott International Hotel Group headquarters, and two-thirds of them were "furloughed" in March. Marriott gave a decent explanation for this, saying it was not layoffs but furloughs, but by September, these "forced furlough" employees still had not returned to work. On October 23, Marriott International Hotel Group was also reported to have laid off 17 employees, involving 673 people.

In the capital market, Marriott’s market value has evaporated by US$5.19 billion in the past month or so, and its total market value was US$30.122 billion on October 30.