Be cautious with your credit info at hotels

Hotel rooms can help you out in a pinch, or can just provide a seemingly safe place for you to comfortably have a rest. The routine is simple for most places, and all you have to do is throw a credit card at an attendant to get a bed and a bathroom for the evening. But putting down a credit card at the front desk may get you more than just a night's sleep.

Many consumers tend to take for granted the level of vulnerability our technological asphyxiation leaves us with. Using credit is a great way to establish a financial history, but it can also leak valuable information to techno-thieves looking to bank off of your hard earned dough.

A recent study conducted by SpiderLabs, a part of the data-security consulting company Trustwave, shows that 38 percent of the credit fraud cases reported last year are linked to the hotel industry. By using the internet signal, provided free of charge by most hotels, computer hackers have found a way to steal your credit information.

Computer hackers are becoming increasingly known for heisting sensitive personal information to turn a profit. Unfortunately, a lot of hotels are ill equipped to handle such security breaches.

According to Anthony C. Roman, in an interview with the New York Times, "It doesn't require brilliance on the part of the hacker. Most of the chronic security breaches in the hotel industry are the result of a failure to equip, or to properly store or transmit, this kind of data, and that starts with the point-of-sale credit card swiping systems."

To combat this problem, hotels across the board are stepping up their internet safety. Before checking into a hotel, make sure to ask about credit security within the computer system, and find out if the place that will be putting you up for the night shreds their hard documents after your stay. If the place can confidently support their security of personal information, then you're probably in the clear.

Losing your credit information may be a pain in the neck, but don't get too bent out of shape if you fall victim to this kind of crime. "After all, the credit card company usually gets stuck with most of the bill if a consumer notifies the company of the misuse promptly," Roman said.

-AJ Register