14 DAY TRIAL // A Chinese hacker of a group called the “Harbors of Evil Goods” has stolen the details of around 20 million hotel reservations allegedly from the website of CNWisdom, China’s largest wireless Internet service provider for hotels.
The attackers are said to have leveraged a vulnerability in the company’s systems to gain access to the data.
The South China Morning Herald reports that the breach – in which phone numbers, email addresses and physical addresses were compromised – was discovered in September by the online security organization WooYun.
At the time, CNWisdom noted that the data might come from another source since some of the impacted hotels were not their customers.
Since then, the information has been made available on numerous websites, including on the popular WeChat messaging platform. The hotel booking details have also been published on peer-to-peer file sharing websites.
The records have been removed from several websites, but the data keeps popping up.
A Chinese publication has reported that a woman has cancelled her wedding after using the leaked data to analyze her future husband’s hotel reservations.