Vacationers using mobile apps to reserve their hotel rooms have recently been hit by a targeted skimming attack.
Trend Micro found a series of security incidents that took place earlier this morning where the booking sites belonging to two popular hotel chains were hit by credit card skimming malware known as Magecart.
Both sites were developed by Barcelona based Roomleader. The impacted hotels have a huge footprint throughout the globe. One brand has over 73 hotel chains in 14 different countries. The second chain has 107 hotels also in 14 different countries.
Cybercriminals were able to walk away with the data by replacing the original credit card form on the booking page of the websites with a fake one, consequently stealing the data entered into the fake form by the user. The original form did not ask visitors to fill out their credit card verification number, which led the hackers to create a fake form asking for the verification number.
The hackers now have users' names, email addresses, phone number, credit card details and verification numbers, and hotel room preferences.
To make the malicious form seem more legitimate, the fraudsters prepared credit card forms in eight different languages supported by the targeted hotel websites.
It was also recently reported that Magecart was found to have breaches almost 962 e-commerce stores in early July 2019. In this incident hackers inserted a customized Javascript on hundreds of e-commerce sites, which acted as a fake credit card payment section and was designed to collect e-commerce customers' payment details.
Operating an e-commerce site comes with responsibilities, especially when payment card information is collected. Every company dealing with payment card transactions must adhere to the PCI DSS Compliance Standard, which includes protections like intrusion protection systems and understanding the requirements and responsibilities of the merchant.