NIST Publishes Guide for Securing Hotel Property Management Systems

These sensitive systems store guests’ personal data and payment-card information.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a cybersecurity guide for the hospitality industry to help reduce security risks related to hotel property-management system software.

These systems store guest personal information and credit card data – an attractive target for hackers. NIST’s new guide provides security recommendations and suggestions for using commercially available products to control and limit access to the software, with the goal of better protecting guest privacy and payment card information.

In recent years attackers have compromised the networks of several major hotel chains, exposing the information of hundreds of millions of guests, NIST noted.

Recent research from Trustwave finds the hospitality ranked third among industries compromised by cybersecurity breaches in 2019, and the industry suffered 13% of the total incidents. About two-thirds of these breaches were attacks on their corporate servers, which typically store guest information and communicate with on-site property management systems.

The practice guide also introduces the tenets and components of zero trust architecture for the hospitality industry.

The entire guide is available here.

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