Hackers steal data from 5 million Marriott guests, company says. Is your information safe?

Hackers accessed personal information of about 5.2 million Marriott guests, the hotel chain said Tuesday.

It’s the second major data breach in the last two years for Marriott, which was also hacked in November 2018.

Marriott said at the end of February it identified “that an unexpected amount of guest information” was accessed using the login information of two employees. The company immediately began an investigation, it said.

The data breach likely began in mid-January, Marriott said. The hotel chain believes hackers accessed contact details for 5.2 million guests, as well as loyalty account information, personal details such as birthday and employment information and partnerships and affiliations.

Marriott sent emails to guests involved In the breach and set up a website, mysupport.marriott.com, to provide additional information for people affected.

Payment Information, passport information and driver’s license numbers were likely not included In the data breach, the hotel chain said.

“The company does not currently believe that its total costs related to this incident will be significant,” Marriott said.

Tyler Carbone, chief strategy officer for digital risk protection provider Terbium Labs, told CNBC the breach is a concern for other companies.

“This breach exposes a tremendous amount of personal data that is the raw material bad actors use to construct attacks,” he said. “It also exposes employer information, which is basically a starting target list for those attacks.”

Marriott is offering guests the option to enroll in a “personal Information monitoring service” free for one year, it said.

In the 2018 data breach, hackers accessed information for as many as 383 million guests.

This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 9:37 AM.