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Comment by ycombonator | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese hacked the entire OPM database and siphoned of the data of all government employees. Hacked Marriot. It’s anyone’s guess how will they mine and use this information.

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The entire CIA network in China was recently brought down from stuff like this while the agents of Chinese military are masquerading as innocent Chinese graduate students and copying University hard drives as fast as possible. My coworker from Carnegie Mellon described the situation years ago and it seems pretty grim.

Their intentions are pretty obvious. Use that data to identify intelligence sources to blackmail, find potential double agents to recruit, and stop potential infiltration into their own intelligence agencies.

It's easy to think of ways to combine all of these hack data streams into one database that can be cross referenced. You go to China on a visa, your entry to the country trips a flag in a system, and an intelligence agent shows up at your hotel to recruit you.

i'm trying my absolute hardest to be constructive, but what in the hell are you smoking?

Sorry, have you not been paying attention for the last 10 years?

This sounds plausible when thought about in the context of cases that are publicly known: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_spy_cases_in...

They didn't exactly hack Marriott. They hacked Starwood, which had been bought by Marriott. I don't mean to nitpick but there are far more Marriott guests than Starwood guests.

The Marriott system is still riddled with vulnerabilities. Had someone transfer 200,000 points out of my account recently. No way they stole my session cookie, and the password was very complex, unique to Marriott and generated / stored by LastPass. There was no attempt to change my password. Now what's interesting is that the points to airline infrastructure likely is a SPG legacy backend that is still running.

Woah. 200,000 points. Thats a lot of stays and or purchases. Did they acknowledge the theft ?

Most people who have workstation malware are unaware of the fact that they have workstation malware.

So assuming that his machine is compromised, the first method of attack was Marriott points? Sounds shockingly similar to the responses I got in a similar situation with my Bethesda.net account getting hacked. Again, complex PW from a manager. How likely is it that if someone gained access to that vault or my PC the first thing they would attack would be an account which only lets them gain access to a garbage fallout game and not my email/social media/bank account?

Considering the large amount of points in OP's Marriott account, I highly doubt that was the highest-value target available. Considering it's already known that parts of their network were compromised, Occam's razor points to this being a vuln on the hotel's end.

Sounds like they would be specifically targeted. It could be mailware that's delivered over the hotel's wifi or perhaps the maids dropping mailware on unattended laptops? If Marriott investigates this, they should look if similar incidents happened and correlate them with recent stays.

Far fewer is still: 343 million customer records, 25.55 million passport numbers (5.25 million in plaintext), 8.6 million encrypted payment cards.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-marriott-intnl-cyber/marr...

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