SecurityCurve Weblog

Best Western: Failboat? or just Fail-Canoe?

So, you heard about Best Western, right? The Sunday Herald originally ran the story saying that up to 8,000,000 records were impacted. Best Western says that wasn't the case. So which is it? I'm not sure we'll ever know. We can speculate, or dig around to try to get more data, but at the end of the day, it's going to be hard to figure out.

Not that it matters for where I'm going with this, but my personal take is that Best Western must have some kind of leg to stand on since they put out a press release refuting the Sunday Herald story. Say, hypothetically, that the original story as reported was accurate - can you imagine the world of pain and suffering that Best Western would experience in terms of bad PR? We know from Hannaford and TJX that not much happens to you when you lose a lot of data - but if you say you didn't lost the data and then it turns out you did? That's like a PR bunker-bomb. So it seems to me like the stakes of the press release being false are so high that - in my opinion - it's likely to be almost retentively accurate.