Booking.com Hit By Data Breach (pcmag.com) 14
Booking.com says hackers accessed customer reservation data in a breach that may have exposed booking details, names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and messages shared with accommodations. PCMag reports: On Sunday, users reported receiving emails from Booking.com, warning them that "unauthorized third parties may have been able to access certain booking information associated with your reservation." The email suggests the hackers have already exploited customer information.
"We recently noticed suspicious activity affecting a number of reservations, and we immediately took action to contain the issue," Booking.com wrote. "Based on the findings of our investigation to date, accessed information could include booking details and name(s), emails, addresses, phone numbers associated with the booking, and anything that you may have shared with the accommodation."
Amsterdam-based Booking.com has now generated new PINs for customer reservations to prevent hackers from accessing them. Still, the incident risks exposing affected customers to potential phishing scams. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and several Reddit users say they received scam messages from accounts posing as Booking.com.
"We recently noticed suspicious activity affecting a number of reservations, and we immediately took action to contain the issue," Booking.com wrote. "Based on the findings of our investigation to date, accessed information could include booking details and name(s), emails, addresses, phone numbers associated with the booking, and anything that you may have shared with the accommodation."
Amsterdam-based Booking.com has now generated new PINs for customer reservations to prevent hackers from accessing them. Still, the incident risks exposing affected customers to potential phishing scams. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and several Reddit users say they received scam messages from accounts posing as Booking.com.
Surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
Perl itself is neither here nor there with respect to security. But lack of tests and pushing straight to production... those are WTFs.
Re:Surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
perl directly is not a issue, as long you understand what it is doing. Just because is not a hyped language anymore, it still works very well
No tests and push to prod are a problem.
About the hack, i have 4 reservations, yet i only received notification about one of them, that is strange. I have both older and newer reservations of that affected. Maybe it was just the interconnect with other platforms (airbnb? other house renting service?)
Re: (Score:1)
Everything was written in Perl.
Perl really isn't that bad. I'd rather use a site written in Perl than Next.js [bleepingcomputer.com] for example.
Re: (Score:3)
Booking was also been taking over by American private equity around then. Who doesnt care about long term health or data security.
hacking.com (Score:2)
hacking.yeah
Booking contact support sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Three weeks ago I did a reservation booking and immediately received a message from the "host" to pay for the room within the next 12 hours with a link leading to a booking.com clone website asking card details. It look really legit, except one strange message: "If you don't remember the sum to pay, just enter 350€". Even Google chrome detected this as scam and shown the red warning screen about the site being a phishing danger.
I've reported this issue to customer support (cloned site, screenshots) and their answer was "If you are not comfortable about entering your card details you can try to contact the property directly using their phone number". I wonder how it could have helped?
Lucky I could cancel the reservation without any penalty and I'm really thinking not to use booking in the future. They take the commission but can't even make a simple check about a property which is obviously a scam ...
Very unprofessional.
Re:Booking contact support sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
It apparently happens a lot, and it's outside of booking.com's control (although the hack in TFS is obviously on them), so all booking.com can do it advise you that they don't reach out view email or WhatsApp, and all you can do it pay attention to the booking details on the main booking.com site and only interact through that. Or use a different hotel booking site.
Don't try and report these to booking.com, btw, as you found out, they clearly give zero fucks. I had that kind of scam happen with one booking out of four on a trip (obvious scammer reached out on WhatsApp) and ended up going around and around in circles on booking.com to try and find a way to flag the fact that there was a compromise, probably on the hotel's side. After 3 laps I gave up, cancelled all four bookings, blocked the spammer on WhatsApp, and rebooked using a different agent swapping out the compromised hotel for another one. I can only assume that booking.com is definitely doing their part to ensure the enshittification of the Internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, thanks for the explanation, very helpful!
Everything that can be has been breached (Score:1)
This just isn't newsworthy anymore. It's like saying "the sun rose above the horizon today".
Just conduct your daily business with that in mind, and you will never be disappointed