To survive in a post pandemic world, the hospitality sector across the globe leveraged technology-powered solutions. These sophisticated technologies helped them to overcome umpteen challenges and give an elevated customer experience.
However, this technology dependency is not without consequences. It has its concomitant challengers and cybersecurity concerns too. In this article we will explore the cybersecurity challenges that the hospitality sector faces and the solutions to ensure customer data security.
Cybersecurity Challenges in hospitality sector:
- Payment card data theft
The hospitality sector processes massive amounts of sensitive card data of customers. This makes them more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Taking advantage of any minor flaw or vulnerability in the system, cyber frauds can access the information and commit large scale fraud and misappropriation of funds.
Data theft is becoming more rampant with the increase in the number of global digital transactions. From making online reservations to final checkout, the hospitality sector has several touch points mainly while dealing with online hospitality payment solutions. Making each of these touchpoints as secure as possible is critical. Data breaches and theft not only impact customers but are also detrimental to business trust and reputation, apart from financial and legal consequences.
- POS system threat
Point of sale systems are incorporated into payment management systems or hotel management systems. This can make the entire ecosystem vulnerable to foreign and external threats.
By compromising the POS system, malicious actors can access sensitive customer data, and use it to manipulate transactions or even to deploy malware into the system. Since hotels depend on these systems to process payments, any vulnerability or malware in the system can have detrimental effects on the business.
- Privacy concerns
As mentioned earlier, the hospitality sector deals with a lot of sensitive private information about customers. Breaches in customer data protection can lead to privacy violations and international data protection laws.
Any breach can attract fines from international regulatory bodies, and this can create damage in trust and irrevocable reputational hazards.
- Ransomware threat
Ransomware attacks are rampant across industries and the hospitality sector is no different. A successful ransomware attack means disruption in business operations. The repercussions of such attacks can be huge financial loss, reputational damage and business continuity taking a hit. Even for an established business, recovering from such damages is challenging.
- Third party vendor risks
It is common for hospitality businesses to outsource services and they depend on third party vendors for this. Be it reservations, payment processing or property management, multiple vendors take up contracts. This is again introducing additional risk factors.
Any compromised security apparatus in any of these external sources can prove detrimental to the business, thereby threatening the entire security posture of the business.
What are the possible cybersecurity solutions?
- Advanced Technology
Implementing advanced technologies like data encryption, tokenization, strong customer authentication techniques, can be leveraged to ensure robust security at all touch points. End to end encryption of data both at transit and at rest is a good strategy so that even if a system breach occurs, data will remain inaccessible and unavailable.
- Regular Audits & Assessments
Regularly conducting audits and security assessments will help in identifying vulnerabilities early on. This can prevent large scale breaches and helps business to stay ahead and take pre-emptive measures.
- Training & Awareness among Employees
Ensuring that all your employees are well trained and aware always will prove to be a great investment. In case of a breach, q well-trained staff will know what course of action to follow. An informed and aware employee will identify phishing attempts easily and provide frontline defense against such events.
- Security Solutions
Implementing robust security solutions will always pay dividends. Sturdy end point security apparatus will protect devices when connected to other networks or third-party systems. This will include a host of solutions like implementing antivirus, firewalls, and even intrusion detection solutions. Regularly updating software is critical too.
Every industry has its own set of challenges and in today's digital world, every sector suffers from cyber-attacks in one way or the other. However, with prudent decisions and by utilizing technologically advanced solutions, most of these can be averted.
Apart from these, measures like incident response and recovery plans, securing third-party touch points, continuously monitoring all systems, ensuring hundred percent compliance of all Data Protection regulations are all a great way to ensure secure environment across systems.
