Centara Hotels & Resorts is one of Thailand’s leading hotel groups, having 46 deluxe and first-class properties across Thailand. This group also has 24 hotels and resorts located in the Maldives, Vietnam, Bali, Sri Lanka, Qatar, Laos, Oman, Turkey, and China.
Unfortunately, the hotel group recently reported a data breach incident that was the work of an infamous group of cybercriminals who were the mastermind of a series of attacks in recent weeks.
Thirayuth Chirathivat, CEO of Centara Hotels & Resorts, said that on October 14, they were “made aware” of a cyberattack on the hotel chain’s network.
According to an official investigation, it was confirmed that the cyber attackers had breached the hotel system and accessed some customers’ data. The stolen data includes names, information related to booking, telephone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and photos of IDs.
According to Thirayuth Chirathivat:
Whilst the breach has been successfully contained, the investigation into the source, root cause, and complete extent of the incident remains ongoing. We will provide more information when it becomes available. We can confirm that we at Centara Hotels & Resorts will not be contacting you to ask for any personally identifiable information
The Desorden Group has come forward and accepted the responsibility for the cyberattack on Centara Hotels & Resorts. This is the same group that recently attacked Acer – the famous laptop manufacturer.
The group has also accepted the responsibility for breaching the servers of Central Group. This data breach allowed them access to 80 GBs of files, including customers’ personal information and business details of each restaurant.
In a message sent to ZDNet, the Desorden Group confirmed that the hotel hack was part of a larger attack scheme on Central Group, owned by the Chirathivat family and worth $11.6 billion.
While the hacker group avoided confirming whether this was a ransomware attack, they did confirm that they easily brought down their entire backend network.
According to them, they were able to steal 400 GB of files over 10 days period. The files they managed to steal include information about everyone who stayed at any of the 70 hotels owned by the Thai conglomerate between 2003 and 2021.
The group also confirmed that they were only showing how they might “mitigate future attacks,” and they were the ones who informed the hotel management about the hack.
As per the statement issued by the Desorden group, this attack was an attempt to assist the hotel in realizing how they can prevent themselves from such attacks in the future. Also, the group claimed that they were the ones who informed the company that they had been hacked.
According to the operators connected to Desorden, they were trying to negotiate a ransom payment of $900,000, but the company decided to back out the deal on Tuesday. As a result, the group is now threatening the company that they’ll leak the information.
Centara Hotels & Resorts and Central Restaurants Group have refused to respond to any comments about the hackers’ claims.