By Vanessa Cavasinni, editor Australian Hotelier
Point of sale provider, H&L Australia, has had one of its servers breached by Eastern European hackers.
H&L Australia offers point of sale solutions for the hospitality industry, and its clients include Saturno Group, Hurley Group and Australia’s largest pub group, Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group (ALH).
Fortunately, the hackers were only able to breach one server that largely stored marketing material, with the only information they were able to download being H&L Australia’s client list and contact details – none of the pub groups’ patrons personal information, including credit card numbers were accessed.
This was confirmed to TheShout by David Curry, head of regulatory and corporate affairs at ALH: “There has been no breach of any ALH customer data. H+L do not store any ALH customer credit card information or customer data.
“There is no link or risk to either ALH or Woolworths systems.”
H&L Australia’s CEO, Burt Admiraal, explained the extent of the breach, stressing that no credit card information or consumer data was stored by H&L Australia.
"We have completed our internal investigation and we have determined that it was only our CRM server which was compromised. This server is used by our support team to record cases, and for marketing to our current and potential clients. No other servers were compromised in any way."
Admiraal suggested that the only effect the breach will have on clients is that they may receive some indiscrimanate spam, and has asked that clients forward any suspicious marketing, so that H&L Australia can help CERT Australia and Federal Police isolate the hackers and any third parties who purchased the data.