The Reservation Hijack: When Your Hotel Booking Becomes a Cyber Trap

Gen Digital details a Reservation Hijack Scam where attackers use legitimate booking context and compromised hotel management platforms to send believable payment-verification messages (via WhatsApp/SMS/email) that lead to fake guest portals or malicious documents to harvest card data; the campaign leverages stolen credentials, branded PDFs as trust amplifiers, and short deadlines to force compliance, and has been observed across multiple countries, prompting recommendations to verify requests through official hotel channels and strengthen authentication and anomaly detection.