CASE STUDYHersha Hospitality Management Closes Email Security Gap
Hotel Management Firm Protects Customer and Employee PII from Phishing Attacks by Automating
Email Security and Remediation with GreatHorn
COMPANY OVERVIEW

At-a-Glance
HEADQUARTERS
Harrisburg, PAWEBSITE

Hersha Hospitality Management (HHM), part of
the Hersha Group, is a 5,000-person industryleading hotel management firm that provides
turnkey management from accounting services
and revenue management to IT services andsupport for more than 125 hotels and resortcomplexes across the United States.

www.hhmhospitality.com

SECURITY FOR PII AND PCI COMPLIANCEINDUSTRY

Cybercriminals have increasingly targeted the hospitality industry
because they handle sensitive data such as personally identifiable
information (PII). Many hotel brands have reported large-scale data
breaches through a variety of threat vectors such as point-of-sale (POS)
exploits, targeted spear phishing, and malware-based attacks.

Travel/Hospitality
CHALLENGE
Protect employees from targetedphishing and other types of malwarebased attacks with the least business
impact causing email delays ordowntime.
ENVIRONMENT>> Fast-paced business, reliant onemail performance>> High exposure to PII in generaland credit card data in particular>> Distributed workforce acrossmultiple locations>> Cloud-first IT strategy>> Email platform: Google G Suite
WHY GREATHORN?
>> Simple and fast cloud-based set
up and management>> No interruption to mail delivery>> Ability to more accurately
identify and prevent payloadfree phishing attacks>> Quick and easy remediation forzero-day attacks

CASE STUDY HERSHA HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT
CSHHM11183

HHM’s Vice President of IT Jason Shane and IT Security Engineer YoelAlvarez knew they needed to implement a modern cybersecurity strategy
that could protect HHM from advanced email threats. Since credit cards
are the primary payment method in the hospitality industry, the teamis particularly proactive about ensuring compliance with the payment
card industry data security standards (PCI DSS). The team conducted aninitiative to identify the greatest threat vectors to PCI compliance in thehospitality industry, and found email to be one of the most insecure.

SECURITY AWARENESS TRAINING IS NOT ENOUGH
HHM uses Google’s G Suite for business productivity andcommunications. However, while G Suite provides many advantages,
its email security capabilities can’t adequately protect against thesophistication of today’s targeted phishing attacks.
And yet with the company’s geographically dispersed operations, email
remains a critical platform for certain types of communication such as
new HR policies and procedures, guidance from the executive team toregional managers, business changes and more. In addition, customers
often use email to communicate with hotel staff and will provide sensitive
credit card information via email. All in all, HHM processes about half amillion incoming and intra-organizational emails each week.
“Email is one of the biggest targets for hackers. If just one of theseattacks successfully made it through to our finance system, for example,
the damage would be huge,” explained IT Security Engineer Yoel
Alvarez. “We can’t afford a single breach.”greathorn.com

To minimize that possibility, HHM invested heavily
in cybersecurity awareness training to educate
employees on what phishing attacks were, how
they worked, and how to flag them for remediation.
However, across the hospitality industry, employee
bases fluctuate pretty significantly.
Describes Alvarez: “We were constantly training. But
we knew that not all our employees were giving thisthe attention it deserved. We needed a tool that
could provide an upper layer of defense so that we
could protect those users in a different way.”
HHM’s cloud-first strategy immediately disqualified
email security solutions that interrupted mail flowby changing mail routing and MX records. They
also wanted to avoid the mail disruption caused byrelying on a single point of failure such as a secure
email gateway–a point driven home during a proof ofconcept with a secure email gateway vendor when thesystem went down and lost email for 45 minutes.

AUTOMATING EMAIL SECURITY
While searching for alternatives, Alvarez foundGreatHorn. Architected and built for the cloud,GreatHorn’s solution combines advanced threat
intelligence and deep relationship analytics to identify
both widespread known attacks as well as highly
targeted or zero-day attacks.
Because the product sees all email within theorganization, it has an evolving understanding of
HHM’s unique communication patterns, making itmuch easier to see phishing attacks that have noobvious known malicious threat.
In addition to identifying threats other products
can’t, GreatHorn also provides HHM’s end users with
context around emails that are suspicious but don’tquite meet the threshold of an obvious threat. For
example, if an email references a W2, it might add
a banner to the email to remind the user that HHM’sbusiness processes don’t allow for W2s to be sent viaemail. That additional warning effectively serves as incontext security awareness training and often provides
the necessary context the user needs to reconsider
responding with sensitive information.
Shane said, “It’s refreshing to work with a vendor thatlooks at security as a continuous improvement cycle
rather than a binary good / bad determination. We
can tune the system based on our business processes
and risk tolerance, and then GreatHorn automatically
optimizes our protection based on our own patternsof communication. This combination makes GreatHorn
so much more effective than other options.”CASE STUDY HERSHA HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT
CSHHM11183

The platform uses native cloud email APIs to integrate
at the mailbox level (without requiring MX changes),so security teams can quickly and easily remove
suspicious emails post delivery if necessary.
Alvarez said, “We needed a robust solution that could
protect us from zero-day attacks as well as phishingcampaigns that were growing in frequency andsophistication. GreatHorn not only identifies morethreats than other products, it also provides us witheasy remediation capabilities in the rare event thatit misses something. We can conduct a quick searchwithin the console to figure out if an attack is limited
or widespread, and then remove all at once fromusers’ inboxes even after they’ve been delivered.”

THE RESULTS
Shane and Alvarez believe that GreatHorn has taken
the pressure off of employees to act as a “humanfirewall” and allows them to communicate withcolleagues and clients confidently.
“GreatHorn is obviously just one part of our larger
security strategy, but it’s a critical one because of
how easy email is to abuse,” said Shane. “WithGreatHorn, we get a multi-layered approach to email
security – not just prevention of known threats andtargeted phishing attacks, but also in-the-moment
user awareness training and incredibly effective
remediation tools. As a result, my security teamspends less time on email threat management andmore time on other critical security areas.”With GreatHorn, my security teamspends less time on email threat
management and more time on othercritical security areas.
Jason Shane, Vice President, IT

Continued Alvarez, “We were one of GreatHorn’s
first customers because they were the only ones whoprovided cloud-based answer to phishing. From thebeginning, GreatHorn has provided a very uniqueapproach to a tough problem, and they’ve continued
to build on that advantage as they matured theproduct to the enterprise-class solution it is today. On
top of that, the team at GreatHorn is extraordinary.
I know from every interaction that they’re listening andcommitted to our success.”greathorn.com