Marriott Lowered The Number Of Guests Affected By Its Data Breach. Class Action Lawsuits Filed

Important updates about the gigantic Marriott-Starwood data breach. The incident received more attention after security experts said that China's intelligence agencies may have been behind the cyberattack, which also targeted healthcare insurance companies.

Earlier this month, Marriott announced a lower number of guests affected:

"Working closely with its internal and external forensics and analytics investigation team, Marriott determined that the total number of guest records involved in this incident is less than the initial disclosure... Marriott now believes that the number of potentially involved guests is lower than the 500 million the company had originally estimated [in November, 2018]. Marriott has identified approximately 383 million records as the upper limit for the total number of guest records that were involved...

The announcement also said that fewer than 383 million different persons were affected because its database contained multiple records for the same guests. The announcement also stated that about:

"... 5.25 million unencrypted passport numbers were included in the information accessed by an unauthorized third party. The information accessed also includes approximately 20.3 million encrypted passport numbers... Marriott now believes that approximately 8.6 million encrypted payment cards were involved in the incident. Of that number, approximately 354,000 payment cards were unexpired as of September 2018..."

This is mixed news. Fewer breach victims is good news. The bad news: multiple database records for the same guests, and unencrypted passport numbers. Better, stronger data security always includes encrypting sensitive information. The announcement did not explain why some data was encrypted and some wasn't.

The hotel chain said that it will terminate its Starwood reservations database at the end of the year, and continue its post-breach investigation:

"While the payment card field in the data involved was encrypted, Marriott is undertaking additional analysis to see if payment card data was inadvertently entered into other fields and was therefore not encrypted. Marriott believes that there may be a small number (fewer than 2,000) of 15-digit and 16-digit numbers in other fields in the data involved that might be unencrypted payment card numbers. The company is continuing to analyze these numbers to better understand if they are payment card numbers and, if they are payment card numbers, the process it will put in place to assist guests."

Also, the hotel chain admitted during its January 4th announcement that it still wasn't fully ready to help affected guests:

"Marriott is putting in place a mechanism to enable its designated call center representatives to refer guests to the appropriate resources to enable a look up of individual passport numbers to see if they were included in this set of unencrypted passport numbers. Marriott will update its designated website for this incident (https://info.starwoodhotels.com) when it has this capability in place."

In related news, about 150 former guests have sued Marriott. Vox reported that a class-action lawsuit:

"... was filed Maryland federal district court on January 9, claims that Marriott did not adequately protect guest information before the breach and, once the breach had been discovered, “failed to provide timely, accurate, and adequate notice” to guests whose information may have been obtained by hackers... According to the suit, Marriott’s purchase of the Starwood properties is part of the problem. “This breach had been going on since 2014. In conducting due diligence to acquire Starwood, Marriott should have gone through and done an accounting of the cybersecurity of Starwood,” Amy Keller, an attorney at DiCello Levitt & Casey who is representing the Marriott guests, told Vox... According to a December report by the Wall Street Journal, Marriott could have caught the breach years earlier."

At least one other class-action lawsuit has been filed by breach victims.