Hotel Data Breach: Riverside Candlewood Suites Included

HARFORD COUNTY, MD — More than 1,000 hotels nationwide were part of a massive data breach, and two Harford County hotels were included in the list of those impacted.

Candlewood Suites in the 4200 block of Philadelphia Road was affected by the cyberattack, in which data from customers' credit card transactions was potentially accessed, officials said. Holiday Inn Express in the 1000 block of Beards Hill Road was also affected.

InterContinental Hotels Group — parent company of Candlewood Suites, Holiday Inn and other hotels — announced more than 1,000 of its locations may have been subject to a breach of customer credit card information between Sept. 29 and Dec. 29, 2016.

If you've been a customer at one of the group's hotels during that time period and believe your credit card information might have been stolen, InterContinental Hotels Group has posted an easily searchable list of compromised hotels and the timeframes during which the information was vulnerable.

The conglomerate discovered malware on its credit card processing systems tracked data from customers' transactions, including guests' names, credit card numbers, expiration dates and internal verification code. Customers who believe they may have been affected should check their credit card statements for unusual activity or fraudulent purchases.

The hotel group hired a cybersecurity firm to investigate the incident. While malware was not removed from the hotels' systems until the investigation in February and March, the group has found no evidence that any breaches occurred after Dec. 29. The group's hotels had begun moving to use Secure Payment Solutions, a program that encrypts customer credit card information, before the incident began.

Companies across the globe, as well as governments, continue to struggle in the fight to keep data secure. In recent years, Yahoo suffered a massive breach of data for hundreds of millions of users. Home Depot and Target have both had credit card information stolen from millions of their customers. Even hospitals have been frequent targets of hackers looking for valuable personal information.

— By Cody Fenwick (Patch National Staff)

Image via Pixabay.