Last year it was reported that the Marriott Starwood database had been breached by hackers, where it was initially estimated that about 500 million guests had their details exposed. However in an update provided by Marriott, it seems that the actual number of guests affected might be smaller than they thought.According to the update, it is now believed that maybe 383 million guest details might have been affected by the breach. Granted this is by no means a small figure, but it also means that less people have had their details exposed. Marriott also claims that the 383 million figure aren’t unique guests, meaning that there could have been multiple records for the same guest. This means that the actual number of people affected could potentially be less than that.
Unfortunately there is some bad news too because according to Marriott, they believe that 5.25 million unencrypted passport numbers were included in breach, and about 20.3 million encrypted passport numbers as well. According to the hotel, “Marriott is putting in place a mechanism to enable its designated call center representatives to refer guests to the appropriate resources to enable a look up of individual passport numbers to see if they were included in this set of unencrypted passport numbers.”
So far the investigations into the breach are still ongoing, and last we heard, it was suggested that this could have been the work of hackers from China as part of an intelligence-gathering mission.