Reports suggest Trump Hotel chain credit card breach

Guess what? It seems another hotel chain has suffered a credit card breach. According to the Krebs on Security blog there are reports that the Trump Hotel Collection is the latest victim to fall.

There’s allegedly a pattern of fraudulent charges that seem to point back to the Trump Hotel chain. Trump Hotels declined to comment, but Brian Krebs explains, “But sources in the financial industry say they have little doubt that Trump properties in several U.S. locations—including Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York—are dealing with a card breach that appears to extend back to at least February 2015.”

Fake card skimmers and compromised point-of-purchase systems are all too common these days. Major companies continue to fall like dominoes as cyber criminals target consumer credit card data. The magnetic stripe data is particularly valuable because it can be sold on the black market and used to create fake credit cards that can be used for fraudulent purchases.

As of October of this year merchants are required to have new point-of-sale card scanning technology capable of working with more secure chip-based cards. Because the authentication is tied to a chip the newer cards are more difficult to clone and therefore more secure. According to Krebs merchants that fail to switch to the new systems will be held responsible for fraudulent activity that results from a breach like this.

The fact that the change to more secure credit card systems is right around the corner is a contributing factor to the escalation of attacks against the current systems. In effect the bad guys are trying to compromise as many systems as they can and collect as much credit cards data as they can before the more secure systems are implemented.

If you’ve visited one of the Trump Hotel Collection properties this year you may soon be hearing from your credit card company about your data being compromised. Make sure you pay close attention to your credit card statements for any signs of strange or fraudulent activity.

This seems to be a fairly regular occurrence these days. OK GO says it well with this video for “Here It Goes Again”: