The Marriott hack is a stark reminder to prepare ahead for a crisis
Corporate Reputation Practice MD Peter Roberts argues that the recent Marriott hack wasn’t a crisis response issue, but a crisis preparedness issue.
Last month brought another large-scale security hack. This time it was the hotelier, Marriott that was the subject of unwanted attention. More precisely, it was their recent acquisition, the Starwood group, which was targeted.
The business operates a number of well-known brands, including W Hotels, Sheraton, Westin and Aloft.
The size of the operation goes some way to rationalise the scale of the breach, which is reported to have impacted as many as 500 million Starwood customers. To put the numbers into context, that’s second only to the 2013 attack on Yahoo, which affected 3 billion users. A distant second place, I recognise, but even so, these are astronomical numbers.
I’m amazed how much this one has sailed under the radar. As an affected party it’s put my personal info including 100points input data into the dark web market.
Even odder, it’s riding alongside one of the most stuffed up, ineffective merger of points schemes: I’m carrying three Starwood and Marriott accounts around because they can’t work out how to fuse them together!