Marriott has recently announced its Starwood guests may have been affected by a major hack on the company’s reservations database. Thought to have affected around 500 million entries, the information is believed to include both standard personal data, like names, email addresses, and phone numbers, but also atypical information like passport numbers. It’s this latter breach that has caused considerable concern.
“Passport data is something you should hold onto more tightly than something like a driver’s license. The biggest problem is that if someone is able to get a passport with your identity, they can cross jurisdictions,” Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, told Popular Science. “The nightmare scenario is that you travel overseas and someone has committed a crime there in your name.”
Concerns have also been raised about the pooling of passport information with other leaked or hacked data, to build more effective profiles for fraud, whether to create new accounts or accessing existing accounts. “Attackers can aggregate that information and cross check it with lots of public information that’s already out there on social media and other public channels,” Gates Marshall, director of cyber services for Compliance Point, told Popular Science. Noted David Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec, to CNBC, “really monitoring your credit is going to be important.”
As with any hack, if you’re affected, it’s important to take the standard set of precautions, including changing any related passwords, monitoring for unauthorized use of your personal information, checking your personal credit, and establishing a personal recovery plan.
Sources:
https://www.popsci.com/passport-number-hacked-marriott
https://lifehacker.com/what-to-do-if-youre-affected-by-marriotts-data-breach-1830774584
https://twocents.lifehacker.com/what-to-do-if-theres-a-data-breach-1826450129
