Marriott reports data breach at Starwood which affected 500 million guests

One of the world’s largest hotel’s and restaurants chain Starwood on Friday confirmed that “Its hotel guest database of about 500 million customers has been stolen in a data breach.”

In a statement issued by, the Marriott a parent company of Starwood has said that “the unauthorized access to its guest database was detected on or before September 10 but may date back as far as 2014.”

The company said that “During the investigation, Marriott has learned that we have found unauthorized access in Marriott networks, which was obtained and decrypted the database of Starwood guest reservation database on November 19.”

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Marriott added that “Over 327 million data of their customers which contained guest names, postal address, date of birth, gender, email address, phone number, Starwood’s reward information (including points and balance) arrival and departure information, reservation data and their communications preferences.”

Adding to the statement, the company said “Marriott also found an unknown number of records contained encrypted credit card data, but has not been ruled out” that the components needed to decrypt the data wasn’t taken.”

The company also stated that “the has started informing those customers who got affected by the data breach including in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.”