Marriott data breach affected 500 million customers over four years

If you value your data privacy, Starwood Points might end up costing you more than they've saved.

Marriott International, Incdisclosed a data breach of its Starwood guest reservation database on Friday. It estimates that the hack has affected 500 million customers, and acknowledged that the compromise had gone undetected for four years; hackers have had access to components of the database since 2014, and Marriott only became aware of any security issue in September 2018.

Yep, that means somebody had four years of unfettered access to a massive database of world travelers and their personal and potentially financial information. It's one of the biggest breaches in history, behind Yahoo's 2013 email hack, which affected 3 billion users. Read more...