The cybersecurity of the leaders in the world of travel has once again been dealt a blow. December 2018, Marriott revealed that 500 million customers who had booked a hotel with the former Starwood group had had their data hacked. This time, it's the turn of a subsidiary of the Accor group, the Gekko groupto be affected by an IT flaw. Although the number of customers potentially affected by this hacking is smaller, in the region of 130,000 to 140,000 travellers according to information revealed by Le Parisien, this hacking directly concerns business travel, as Gekko is the parent company of Teldar Travel and of the HCorpo corporate hotel booking platform whose customers include 14,000 travel agencies and 300 major companies.
Following a firewall failure when updating its server, Gekko left the following open a connection port giving access to a terabyte of information stored by Teldar Travel, the reservation system for professional travel agencies. Although the flaw was plugged on 13 November, a great deal of information was left visible, and potentially at the mercy of ill-intentioned individuals, ranging from booking history to bank details passwords and other personal data.
However, according to Gekko's management, the impact of this flaw will be limited.Very little personal data can be used by outsiders"according to Fabrice Perdoncini, CEO of Gekko, quoted by Le Parisien. Gekko's press release states "that a scan of the transactions has been carried out and that no fraudulent use has been detected". In any case, the absence of the visual cryptogram among the credit card details would have limited the possibilities of use. In addition, as the IT systems between Accor and its subsidiary Gekko are separate, the hotel group itself was not affected by this flaw.
