White Lodging Confirms Hotels Hit by Second Data Breach

Hotel management company White Lodging Services has confirmed a second data breach on its credit card system, affecting 10 hotels, eight of which were Marriott hotels. The original security breach took place in 2014.

According to the company, this breach affected the food and beverage outlets in these 10 properties. White Lodging believes the data breach is limited to information on the debit or credit cards: customer names, card numbers, the security code and expiration dates.

White Lodging is a hotel franchise management company that manages 168 hotels in 21 states, including big-name hotel chains such as Marriott, Hilton and Sheraton. The breach last year affected 14 of its locations. But the time frame for the recent breach was quite expansive--card information was compromised between July 3, 2014, and Feb. 6, 2015.

After the initial breach, White Lodging hired a third-party security firm to better protect its payments processor.

"These security measures were unable to stop the current malware occurrence on point of sale systems at food and beverage outlets in 10 hotels that we manage," Dave Sibley, White Lodging president and CEO for Hospitality Management, said in a statement. "We continue to remain committed to investing in the measures necessary to protect the personal information entrusted to us by our valuable guests."

White Lodging does not know if the second hack was the result of the same group of hackers or a new group, but they are working with law enforcement to get to the bottom of the matter. White Lodging is offering a year of free fraud prevention services through Experian for all guests affected by the breach.

The food and beverage outlets affected are located at: