A hotel reservation platform of Spain based firm Prestige Software which is used by some of the world's largest online booking websites has been exposing highly sensitive data from millions of hotel guests worldwide, dating as far back as 2013 and including credit card details for 100,000s of people, claimed a security team at Website Planet.
Prestige Software sells a channel management platform called Cloud Hospitality to hotels that automate their availability on online booking websites like Expedia and Booking.com
According to Website Planet which deals in online reviews, the Prestige Software was storing years of credit card data from hotel guests and travel agents without any protection on a misconfigured Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket. As a result, a massive amount of data was exposed — over 10 million individual log files in total, dating back to 2013.
The company claimed that each of these records exposed sensitive and valuable Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data belonging to the individuals making the reservations. However, it's difficult to say how many people were affected, due to the amount of data exposed.
The S3 bucket was still live and in use, with new records being uploaded within a few hours of our investigation, said the company.
The company claimed that the S3 bucket contained data that appeared to originate from many well-known sources listed as Cloud Hospitality's customers, including, but not limited to Agoda, Amadeus, Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotelbeds, Omnibees and Sabre, among others.
The security team said that they did not review all the files exposed in the S3 bucket, adding that every website and booking platform connected to Cloud Hospitality was probably affected.
The company said that they investigated several companies potentially responsible for the data breach. However, considering the size of the data exposed and its sensitivity, they decided to contact AWS directly so it could resolve the issue quickly and ensure the breach was closed. The S3 bucket was secured the following day.
