Israeli cybersecurity firm offers free help to hotels after data breaches
The decision follows Marriott International hotel group's announcement that it had suffered a major data breach affecting personal details of approximately 500 million guests.
By EYTAN HALONUpdated: DECEMBER 5, 2018 16:59A Marriott flag hangs at the entrance of the New York Marriott Downtown hotel in Manhattan, New York November 16, 2015(photo credit: REUTERS/ANDREW KELLY)
The Israeli cybersecurity company ITsMine announced this week that it will provide its artificial intelligence-based data protection solution free of charge to the hotel industry through the end of 2019.The decision follows Marriott International hotel group’s announcement that it suffered a major data breach affecting personal details of approximately 500 million guests, the latest in a series of industry data breaches this year.Marriott admitted Friday there had been unauthorized access to its Starwood guest reservation database, and did not rule out the possibility that hackers obtained necessary information to decrypt payment card numbers of some customers.Seeking to better secure organizational data, ITsMine’s automated Data Loss Prevention system promises reduced deployment time and superior protection while detecting data breaches in real-time and blocking data loss. Installation of the system takes only two hours.“Facing increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity attacks and data breaches, companies must find new and improved ways of storing critical customer data,” said ITsMine cofounder and CEO Kfir Kimhi.“We hope that by offering our advanced solutions free of charge. We will encourage hotels to take immediate action on protecting the valuable data of their guests.”Founded in 2017 by Kimhi and a team of IDF technology veterans and experts, ITsMine is a portfolio company of the OurCrowd Labs/02 seed-stage incubator. The company was selected as one of the top 10 most innovative cybersecurity start-ups at September’s Internet Security Conference in China.The Marriott data breach is the latest in a growing number of sophisticated hacking attacks on the hotel industry.In November, Radisson Hotel Group announced that it had identified a breach targeting its Radisson Rewards database. In August, Chinese state media reported that 500 million pieces of customer information belonging to Shanghai-based Huazhu Group had been shared online.On Tuesday, the question-and-answer website Quora said that information belonging to 100 million users was compromised by hackers, gaining access to possible combination of personal information, passwords and direct messages.
