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 Who’s Watching Us?
Planners and hotels grapple with information security at meetings
By MARSHALL KRANTZ
The recent federal action against Wyndham Worldwide for the cyber theft of more than 600,000 customer payment records is raising questions about data security at event venues and just how groups can better protect themselves.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in June filed a lawsuit against the hotel company for a variety of alleged security failures, including inadequate use of firewalls, storing sensitive data in plain text, and creating simple, easily hacked computer passwords.
Wyndham reported three data breaches between 2008 and 2009. Hackers—whom authorities traced to an Internet domain name registered in Russia—made fraudulent transactions with the stolen payment data that topped $10.6 million, according to the FTC.
But Wyndham is not alone in falling prey to cyber theft. Electronic payment processor Global Payments suffered the theft of up to 1.5 million credit card numbers earlier this year and in July, tech giant Yahoo reported that hackers stole the user names and passwords for 450,000 email accounts.
Last year, more than 300 web-based data breaches were publicly disclosed by organizations in 18 countries, according to Trustwave, a leading provider of security for electronic payment systems, in its Trustwave 2012 Global Security Report.
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 Questions of Security
Meetings tech expert Corbin Ball suggests meeting and event planners ask venues the following data-security questions before contracting for a meeting:
- How secure is their computing environment?
- Is there a firewall protecting the database in addition to the one in front of the web server?
- What are their access control policies and procedures to the servers?
- What is the level of data encryption?
- How are financial transactions handled?
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