Hotel hack ‘may hit 500m guests’

about a London Ambulance Service member of staff which reportedly included responding to 999 calls and discharging patients at the scene.

Following inquiries, a man was arrested at an address in Essex. A MAN who pretended to be a victim of the Grenfell Tower disaster, committing a fraud of nearly £90,000, has been jailed.

Abdelkarim Rekaya, 28, enjoyed 209 nights in a four-star hotel, before being provided with a flat in Chelsea in the year after the fire.

He was sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court to four years and six months in prison after he pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation and obtaining leave to remain by deception. THE festive season has officially arrived at Windsor Castle, with beautiful Christmas trees and decorations created by royal staff for visitors.

From today, royal fans visiting the Queen’s Berkshire home can see a 23ft fir tree covered in gold decorations and around 7,000 lights in the castle’s majestic St George’s Hall.

Staff from the Royal Household have spent the past few days erecting the tree, a smaller fir in the nearby crimson drawing room, and other decorations throughout the state apartments to celebrate Christmas. MARRIOTT has announced 500 million guests’ data may have been exposed during breaches in a reservation database that began in 2014.

The “data security incident” hit the system for its Starwood portfolio, which includes Trump Turnberry in Ayrshire, as well as London’s Park Lane Sheraton Grand, Westbury Mayfair and Le Meridien Piccadilly.

Work is continuing but the firm said the breached database contains the information of up to half a billion guests who booked before September 10.

The database stored information including passport numbers, dates of births, names, addresses and phone numbers for 327 million guests.

Payment card numbers and expiration dates were also stored for some.

Marriott, which bought Starwood in 2016, is yet to establish how many UK customers have been affected.

The breach was spotted in the Starwood guest reservation database in the US on September 8 and the company “discovered that an unauthorised party had copied and encrypted information, and took steps

Richard Williams, the Royal Collection Trust’s learning curator, said: “The huge tree in St George’s Hall is from the Windsor Great Park, so it’s actually grown in the grounds surrounding the castle.

“It’s a Nordmann Fir and it has something like 7,000 separate lights on it, so it’s a major, major scale, it took a towards removing it”, a statement said. Security experts determined there “had been unauthorised access to the Starwood network since 2014”, it added.

Researchers decrypted the information and determined its contents were from the Starwood reservation databases on November 19, Marriott said.

Marriott president and chief executive Arne Sorenson said: “We deeply regret this incident happened.

“We fell short of what our guests deserve and what we expect of ourselves.

“We are doing everything we can to support our guests, and using lessons learned to be better moving forward.”

The Maryland-based firm, which has day and a half to decorate so teams were up very, very tall ladders.

“It’s very much for visitors, there are large numbers of people who go to the Royal Collection Trust website to see when the decorations are up because for many people, it marks the start of Christmas.” hotels across the globe, said law enforcement agencies are investigating.

Payment card numbers are encrypted using a method that requires two components to break it, a statement said.

“Marriott has not been able to rule out the possibility that both were taken,” it added.

The National Crime Agency said it is making enquiries.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has begun making inquiries over the breach and has the power to impose large fines.

“We have received a data breach report from Marriott Hotels involving its Starwood hotels and will be making inquiries,” a spokeswoman said.

“We advise people who may have been affected to be vigilant and to follow advice from the ICO and National Cyber Security Centre websites about how they can protect themselves and their data online.”

Facebook was fined £500,000 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw an estimated 87 million users’ data breached, but the tech giant has mounted an appeal.