Oops! Hotel Owned by Air India Publishes Guests’ Passports, Credit Cards

Centaur Hotels Online just got better? Oh really?!

Thanks to a steady flow of news on hacking and security breaches these days, the public is becoming more aware that companies may not be guarding their personal data with the appropriate care. Today there’s news of a hotel in India that didn’t need help from any hackers to leak customer information. Air India Ltd-owned Centaur Hotel published the passports and credit cards of its guests all by itself!

According to The Times of India:

Around 52 scanned copies of passports of people of different nationalities, pan card details of Indian guests and driving licences were visible on the site. The page was taken down when the issue was brought to their notice.

But Centaur doesn’t have any public disclosure of the incident on it’s website, although judging from the appearance of the centaurhotels.com it doesn’t look like much time or resources were invested into the website’s development. We think it’s a safe assumption that Centaur – which incidentally is a four-star, 376-room hotel – didn’t devote much resources into security either.

The Hacker News has published a screenshot of the hotel’s directory listing, along with some photos of credit cards and passports that were published.

While large-scale data breaches are making headlines these days, security experts and hackers alike will tell you that companies have always been lax about protecting public data. If Century Hotel is any indication, that assertion certainly appears to be true.

Screenshot of the open directory, courtesy of Hacker News