Published: February 20, 2020 on our newsletter Security Fraud News & Alerts Newsletter.
Hospitality has been hit again. Well, it was actually last year, but the MGM Resort hotels didn’t make the determination until this past week. It managed to trace a data leak to last summer when it found that someone had accessed a cloud server without permission. That server contained information for “certain previous guests.”
If you were one of the aforementioned previous guests, you should have been notified by MGM, or you will be soon. However, even if you weren’t notified, you should take a few precautions:
Change any passwords to any MGM resort online accounts. This could be casino accounts, hotels, entertainment venues, etc. Though it wasn’t specified if all of those were part of this, it’s always a good idea to play it safe.
Use unique passwords for all online accounts and ensure they are at least eight characters and include numbers, letters, special characters, and cannot easily be guessed.
Watch all payment card charges for suspicious activity. If anything doesn’t look right, call the card issues and clear it up. If it wasn’t your charge, let them know immediately. Watch those charges for at least the next year or until your card expires and you’re issued one with a new number.
Monitor your credit reports regularly. Each person in the U.S. with credit is allowed to check those once a year using annualcreditreport.com. There is no charge for this, though the credit bureaus will try to “upcharge” you for other services. You are not obligated to take those to get your report. Consider getting one of them every 4 months to keep a more active eye on them.
Think about if freezing your credit is a good idea. Congress passed legislation that prohibited the bureaus from charging to freeze or unfreeze your credit. Take advantage of this if it makes sense. Remember that this means no one, even you, can access your credit reports when the freeze is “on.”
As for the numbers involved in this breach, it’s pretty big. Not quite to Marriott numbers which was 500 million guests. However, it was more than 10.6 million according to recent reports. The data included guests’ full names, addresses, email addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers.
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