Hotels have become targets for malicious actors wishing to exfiltrate sensitive data, deliver malware, or profit from undetected fraud. Property management systems, which are central to hotel operations, present attractive attack surfaces.

NIST's National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) collaborated with the hospitality business community and cybersecurity technology providers to build an example solution demonstrating how hospitality organizations can use a standards-based approach and commercially available technologies to meet their security needs for protecting a hotel's property management system. This example solution is described in Draft Special Publication (SP) 1800-27, Securing Property Management Systems.

The principal capabilities found in the guide include protecting sensitive data, enforcing role-based access control, and monitoring for anomalies. Principal recommendations include implementing cybersecurity concepts such as zero trust, moving target defense, tokenization of credit card data, and role-based authentication.