Mandarin Oriental said on Thursday that it has removed the malware that it blamed for the credit card breach that resulted in the theft of customer credit card information in its U.S. and European operations.

The luxury hotel is working with credit card agencies, law enforcers and forensic specialists to improve its security systems and prevent a repeat of the theft, reports ZDNet. While the hotel said it has tested security protocols in every hotel in Europe and the U.S., it did not provide details on specific measures it has undertaken.

Like Us on Facebook

In a statement, the Hong Kong-based hotel chain said, "Unfortunately incidents of this nature are increasingly becoming an industry-wide concern and therefore we have also alerted our technology peers in the hospitality industry," quoted Businesstimes.

Mandarin said that only credit card data were affected by the breach. Other personal information of guests as well as its credit card security codes were not compromised. The codes are the three-digit CSV security codes on the back of the credit cards.

Brian Krebs, a security journalist cited sources in the financial industry as saying that the hotel was alerted of the breach when fraudulent transactions were used in Mandarin Oriental. He adds that the hotel's point-of-sale systems were possibly infected with the malware that accessed systems with authorization and stole the credit card data.

Mandarin runs 44 hotel in 24 countries, of which 10 are in the U.S., 14 in Europe, Middle East and North Africa, and 20 in Asia. Its hotels in Asia were not affected by the breach.

An increase in malware attacks by extracting card data from payment systems has been observed in the retail industry, prompting credit card companies to require retailers to follow the PCI Data Security Standard, a set of guidelines how to handled card data security.

Tagsmandarin oriental, Malware, Credit Card