Taj Hotels Suffer Data Breach, Personal Data Of 15 Lakh People At Risk – News18

Hotels and resorts have a lot of people visiting them. These places collect the personal data of their customers during the time of their check-in and keep it for themselves. But now, an incident has happened where a renowned hotel group has suffered from a data breach.

According to reports, Tata-led Taj Hotels has suffered from a data breach that has exposed the information of over 1.5 million (15 lakh) customers. This has affected the reputation of the hotel group, which has been making efforts to curb the losses incurred due to the breach. The Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL), which runs the Taj Group, has revealed that it is investigating the claims of data leaks made by the group.

In an official statement, the spokesperson of Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) said, “The criminals, known as ‘DanCookies’, are requesting $5,000 (4,16) for the entire dataset, including addresses, membership IDs, mobile numbers, and other personally identifiable information (PII). We have been made aware of someone claiming to be in possession of limited customer data sets that are non-sensitive in nature. We are investigating this claim and have informed the concerned authorities. We continue to monitor our systems. The security of our customers’ data is of utmost importance to us.”

According to reports, the criminals have revealed that the data set they have contains information about people from the 2014–2020 period and has not yet been disclosed. They have also provided a sample that contained one thousand rows of unique entries of data. As per reports, the Indian Computer Emergency Response (CERT-in) has also been made aware of the breach, and they are also investigating the matter.

On the other hand, there has not been any information provided by the Delhi Police about whether they have received any complaints from the Taj Groups or not.

As per reports, three main demands have been put forward by the criminals. 1) There needs to be a middleman for any kind of negotiation. 2) There will be no splitting of data. Either it will be all or nothing. 3) There will be no additional samples of data that will be provided.