How to find out if you were a victim of the Starwood hack
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This past week, Marriott announced that there’s now a webpage you can use to check whether you were a victim of the Starwood hack. If you recall, a few months ago the hotel giant announced that it had learned (after it acquired Starwood) that personal attached to hundreds of millions of Starwood guests been obtained by hackers. According to Reuters, “The hack began in 2014, a year before Marriott offered to buy Starwood to create the world’s largest hotel operator. The $13.6 billion deal closed in September 2016. Some 327 million customer records containing information including passport details, birthdates, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses were exposed, according to the company.”

Now what’s ironic is that to find out if you were indeed a victim of the hack, you have to fill out a form on a page “hosted by security firm OneTrust,” which asks for personal information like your name, email address and the last six digits of your passport number. According to TechCrunch, “The checker won’t kick back a result straight away — you’ll have to wait for a response — and Marriott doesn’t say how long that’ll take.”

I’m curious to find out if my data was compromised but not sure I want to take the risk of divulging more of my personal information. How about you?

1 Comment On "How to Find Out If You Were a Victim of the Starwood Hack"
  1. Alexis J|

    “Ironic” is the least thing you can call them. There’s not only the ironic part of giving away all of my information to check if they lost all of my information, but that unfriendly link with that long series of random numbers makes it easy for someone else who might have access to create a questionnaire in that website to create one similar since there’s no way a person will check if the link ending with “0894cd2c-85ba-4d0b-8ec1-e18….” is legitimate for the Marriot questionnaire itself.

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