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Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

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vintagedave·

At least (?) that's in an app. But it's worse. A hotel told me it's sometimes plaintext over email.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/myste...

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That has to be a PCI violation. Maybe it doesn’t have any teeth. The CC networks seem lax with their rules.

I wonder if the hotel uses an incoming-fax-to-email system.

Nice catch! That was indeed something we found about a decade ago when I worked there. I don't recall what the security folks tried to do about it.

Generally, though, more and more hotels shifted from faxes to API integrations via channel managers. But that's a whole extra step in sophistication.

I worked on some of these systems as well. Credit card details haven't been sent by emails for many many years, and I believe the last fax Booking ever sent was somewhere in 2018 or 2019, the whole fax system was decommissioned. By the time I left I believe they were still showing CC details to hotels via the extranet or an app though. A virtual CC thingy exists, but like someone said upthread, hotels are very set in their ways and often behind the times.

Oh hilarious! The business logic for getting optimal routing for faxes was... quirky. Picking the right source country/line/carrier to get the best quality line while getting the lowest cost and balancing capacity. In the old days all held in a complex queue in a MySQL db (sigh). I recall getting paged out of bed a number of times as an escalation to get it all working again after we hit yet another lock contention issue in MySQL.

Good times!

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