The Hotel Hackers Are Hiding in the Remote Control Curtains

Author: Patrick Clark

Back doors to your personal data can be found in everything from smart fish tanks to Wi-Fi pineapples.

Three men dressed for business travel in jeans and dress shirts loaded backpacks into the trunk of a black coupe and wound their way through the center of a major European city. When they arrived at their hotel, they unloaded their luggage and waited giddily to pass through the revolving doors. They were checking into the hotel to hack it.

Hackers target financial institutions because that’s where the money is, and they target retail chains because that’s where people spend the money. Hotels might be a less obvious target, but they’re hacked almost as often because of the valuable data that passes through them, like credit cards and trade secrets. Thieves have targeted electronic door locks to burgle rooms and used malware attacks to log credit card swipes in real time. They’ve even used Wi-Fi to hijack hotels’ internal networks in search of corporate data. Just about all of the industry’s major players have reported breaches, including Hilton Worldwide Holdings, InterContinental Hotels Group, and Hyatt Hotels.

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