Trump Hotel Collection is latest victim of credit card breach

Target. Hershey Park. Office of Personnel Management. LastPass. Anthem Health. The list goes on (and on, and on) and now the Trump Hotel Collection can be added to the notorious list of data breaches.

I wrote a post about rumors suggesting that credit card data from the Trump Hotel chain has been compromised:

Guess what? It seems another hotel chain has suffered a credit card breach. According to the Krebs on Security blogthere are reports that the Trump Hotel Collection is the latest victim to fall.

There’s allegedly a pattern of fraudulent charges that seem to point back to the Trump Hotel chain. Trump Hotels declined to comment, but Brian Krebs explains, “But sources in the financial industry say they have little doubt that Trump properties in several U.S. locations—including Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York—are dealing with a card breach that appears to extend back to at least February 2015.”

Fake card skimmers and compromised point-of-purchase systems are all too common these days. Major companies continue to fall like dominoes as cyber criminals target consumer credit card data. The magnetic stripe data is particularly valuable because it can be sold on the black market and used to create fake credit cards that can be used for fraudulent purchases.

As of October of this year merchants are required to have new point-of-sale card scanning technology capable of working with more secure chip-based cards. Because the authentication is tied to a chip the newer cards are more difficult to clone and therefore more secure. According to Krebs merchants that fail to switch to the new systems will be held responsible for fraudulent activity that results from a breach like this.

Read the full story on CSOOnline.com: Reports suggest Trump Hotel chain credit card breach.