- Washington hotel hit by ransomware on February 13, unauthorized access to business data confirmed
- “Washington Net” membership system customer information stored externally, not yet confirmed as compromised
- PoS issues were reported, but there were no major outages; investigation ongoing, attackers not identified, no data leaked
Japanese hotel chain The Washington Hotel was attacked with ransomware earlier this month and is currently investigating the attack.
In an announcement posted on the company’s website, the company said it detected the intrusion late on February 13 and acted quickly to cut off the attackers’ access and prevent further damage. An internal task force was created a day later and both police and external cybersecurity experts were notified.
“Unauthorized access to various business data stored on the server has been confirmed,” the automatically translated announcement reads. “The information leak is currently under investigation.”
Are Japanese brands under attack?
The hotel emphasized that customer information from its member organization “Washington Net” is located on a server external to the company, so so far there have been no confirmations that customer data has been captured.
Some hotels reported problems with PoS terminals, the company said, but emphasized that there were “no major disruptions” to business.
Washington Hotel operates under the Fujita Kanko brand. It is a widely recognized hotel chain brand operated by the Japanese hotel company Fujita Kanko which also manages other hotel brands (such as Hotel Gracery). The Washington Hotel group has many properties throughout Japan and is positioned as a mid-range to budget hotel brand for both business and leisure travel.
It has more than 30 locations throughout Japan, 11,000 rooms and nearly five million guests each year.
While some data was most likely stolen, at the time of this publication we don’t know what. No threat actor took responsibility for the attack and no data was leaked to the dark web.
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