Maybe China hacked Marriot. Maybe not.
What made the Starwood attack different was the presence of passport numbers, which could make it far easier for an intelligence service to track people who cross borders. That is particularly important in this case: In December, The New York Times reported that the attack was part of a Chinese intelligence gathering effort that, reaching back to 2014, also hacked American health insurers and the Office of Personnel Management, which keeps security clearance files on millions of Americans.
Marriott Concedes 5 Million Passport Numbers Lost to Hackers Were Not Encrypted
But in a world where there are massive repositories of data on massive numbers of people (cue “IN A WORLD…” dramatic narration), that data is going to be used by governments. That’s just how this is going to work.
(The use of the post title meme probably dates me.)