A hacker working for a US intelligence service broke into Booking.com servers in 2016 and stole user data from the Middle East, according to a book published Thursday. The book also states that the online travel agency chose to keep the incident a secret.
Amsterdam-based Booking.com made the decision after calling on the Dutch intelligence service, also known as the AIVD, to investigate the breach of the company's servers. Following legal advice, the company did not notify the affected customers or the Dutch Data Protection Authority.
The reason; Booking.com was under no legal obligation to do so as no sensitive or financial information was accessed information.
But IT people working at Booking.com told a different story, according to the book De Machine: In de ban van Booking.com (Αγγλική translation: The Machine: Under the Spell of Booking.com). The book's authors, three journalists from the Dutch newspaper NRC, say the internal name for the breach was "PIN leak" because the breach involved stolen PINs from reservations.
The book also states that the person behind the hack had access to thousands of hotel reservations in Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The leaked data concerned Booking.com customer names and their travel plans.
Two months after the breach, US private investigators helped Booking.com's security department determine that the hacker was an American working for a company that performed contracts for US intelligence services. The authors did not specify which agency was behind it invasion.
Hotel reservation data and travel plans are a highly sought after product for hackers working for a state. In 2013, an informant of hers NSA unveiled the "Royal Concierge", a British spy program GCHQ which tracked reservations at 350 luxury hotels worldwide. Secret services use this data to identify the hotel where the targets are staying so they can place bed bugs in theeyeand them.
In 2014, Kaspersky Labs unveiled the Dark Hotel, a campaign that used hotel Wi-Fi networks to infect the devices of targeted visitors in order to gain access to sensitive information. The hackers behind the Dark Hotel - which probably worked for a government - showed particular interest in C-level politicians and executives.
The authors of The Machine reported that a Booking.com spokesperson confirmed that there was unusual activity in 2016, and that security personnel responded immediately to the incident. He also admitted that the company never revealed it because it had no legal obligation to do so.