Hilton Honors Flaw Exposed All Accounts
Hospitality giant Hilton Hotels & Resorts recently started offering Hilton HHonors Awards members 1,000 free awards points to those who agreed to change their passwords for the online service prior to April 1, 2015, when the company said the change would become mandatory. Ironically, that same campaign led to the discovery of a simple yet powerful flaw in the site that let anyone hijack a Hilton Honors account just by knowing or guessing its valid 9-digit Hilton Honors account number.
The vulnerability was uncovered by Brandon Potter and JB Snyder, technical security consultant and founder, respectively, at security consulting and testing firm Bancsec. The two found that once they’d logged into a Hilton Honors account, they could hijack any other account just by knowing its account number. All it took was a small amount of changing the site’s HTML content and then reloading the page.
