Hilton and Marriott Hit by Data Breach

Bloomberg: Marriott International Inc. and Hilton Worldwide are among the growing list of companies affected by a data breach last week that provided unauthorized access to customer names and e-mail addresses.

The affected files didn’t include customer financial information or physical addresses, the hotel chains said in separate statements today. The breach occurred at Epsilon, a Dallas-based provider of e-mail marketing services.

“Epsilon is a major player in this area -- one of the largest,” Mikko Hypponen, a manager at Helsinki, Finland-based F-Secure OYJ’s anti-virus division, said in an interview. “When you have such a large company, there’s a lot of data lost.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, and Kroger Co., the grocer, began the warnings on April 1. Capital One Financial Corp. and TiVo Inc. were also affected. Companies and law enforcement are also investigating the incidents.

Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s travel subsidiary sent e-mails warning customers that it had also been exposed to the breach.

Such e-mail breaches usually involve people who want to sell lists of names to spammers, who can then either spam the names gathered, or use the contact information to impersonate a sender and bypass e-mail filters, Hypponen said.

The situation “will not be a big deal from a legal perspective or a financial perspective” if it remains limited to e-mails and doesn’t involve credit card data, said Robert Scott, managing partner at Southlake, Texas-based law firm Scott & Scott LLP, which focuses on privacy security and regulation issues.

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