While The Trump Hotel Collection is “investigating” yet another breach at their luxury hotel chain, Brian Krebs is reporting that three different sources in the financial sector have told him that they have noticed “a pattern of fraud” that suggests that hackers have breached security at some, if not all, properties in the Trump hotel chain.
Just last July the Trump organization was dealing a cyber security breach. Possibly this is a new attack; possibly they did not clean out all the traces of the old attack.
I assume that they will make a statement once they are done investigating.
In the mean time, it is an embarrassment for the luxury hotel chain to be breached twice in less than a year.
After Krebs reported the earlier breach, Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s son and the executive in charge of the hotels issued a statement that “Like virtually every other company these days, we have been alerted to potential suspicious credit card activity and are in the midst of a thorough investigation to determine whether it involves any of our properties,”. Basically, he said, to quote Tom Peters, We’re no worse than anyone else. But we are no better either.
To add to the embarrassment, Donald Trump said, in an interview with the New York Times, that we’re so obsolete in cyber. He did not offer any suggestions regarding how he would fix that.
If, in fact, his hotels have been hacked, again, his statement will turn out to be correct. I think he was suggesting that this obsolescence is the government’s fault, but the security at his hotels would be his responsibility.
I am sure this will heat up; the item only came out yesterday, so stay tuned.
Information for this post came from Krebs On Security.