Hotel Company Investigating Breach

Hospitality company White Lodging, which manages hotel franchises including Hilton, Sheraton and Marriott, is looking into a possible data breach that may have impacted thousands of credit and debit cards used at a number of its hotels across the U.S.

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"An investigation is in progress, and we will provide meaningful information as soon as it becomes available," a spokesperson for the hotel management company said to Information Security Media Group.

The news comes in the midst of high-profile incidents against Target Corp. and Neiman Marcus that involved compromised payment cards.

In mid-January, BankInfoSecurity spoke with a handful of executives from U.S. card issuers who said card-fraud trails suggested a breach at a leading hotel company and a restaurant chain. Card issuing executives at that time named Marriott, but they could not say whether the potential compromise was linked to Target and Neiman Marcus (see Fraud Patterns Suggest New Breaches).

Security blogger Brian Krebs first reported the story Jan. 31. In the report, Krebs says fraud patterns were seen from cards used at certain Marriott hotels from March 23, 2013 until the end of last year. The hotels were all managed by White Lodging, the report says.

Marriott, in a statement to Krebs, says, "One of its franchisees has experienced unusual fraud patterns in connection with its systems that process credit card transactions at a number of hotels across a range of brands, including some Mariott-branded hotels."

The breach did not impact any of Marriott's own systems, the company said in its statement.

The compromise may have affected restaurants, gift shops and other establishments within White Lodging-managed hotels.

White Lodging operates 168 hotels in 21 states along with more than 30 restaurants, totaling nearly $1 billion in revenue.