COLONIE — Bob Sobeck didn't need to call on his training as a former sheriff's deputy to know there was fraud afoot when he opened his small nonprofit group's credit card statement in November."I looked at the bill and saw a charge to China," said Sobeck, the executive director of the Alfred Housing Committee in Allegheny County. "And the farthest east I'd been was Albany."Specifically, The Desmond Hotel and Conference Center on Albany Shaker Road.Sobeck, who had been in town a month earlier for... COLONIE — Bob Sobeck didn't need to call on his training as a former sheriff's deputy to know there was fraud afoot when he opened his small nonprofit group's credit card statement in November."I looked at the bill and saw a charge to China," said Sobeck, the executive director of the Alfred Housing Committee in Allegheny County. "And the farthest east I'd been was Albany."Specifically, The Desmond Hotel and Conference Center on Albany Shaker Road.Sobeck, who had been in town a month earlier for a New York State Rural Housing Coalition conference, said he believes that roughly $160 fraudulent charge stemmed from a security breach disclosed Friday by the hotel affecting an untold number of guests' credit cards over a 10-month span.In an online letter to customers, operators of the 323-room hotel said the names, credit and debit card numbers and expiration dates, and other data been exposed between May 21, 2011 and March 10 of this year in what the hotel called a "serious data security breach."Debit card PIN numbers are not believed to have been affected, the hotel said.While the U.S. Secret Service and a private firm continue to probe how the breach occurred, hotel General Manager John D'Adamo said the hack — like many cyber attacks — is believed to have come from a foreign country.D'Adamo said The Desmond was tipped to the problem when Secret Service agents showed up in early March saying they were receiving fraud complaints from banks on accounts that seemed to trace back to the prominent hotel."By the 16th of March, we started making telephone calls," D'Adamo said. "If we have their addresses or telephone numbers, we're reaching out to them. ... I heard this from the Secret Service and from the forensic investigative team — we were as proactive and as reactive as we could be in light of the circumstances."State business law requires businesses to notify customers whose personal information may have been stolen in "the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay."While he acknowledged the hotel has received numerous reports of fraudulent charges, D'Adamo said none so far that have resulted in actual financial losses to customers.Still, the hotel is urging guests during that time period to closely watch their account statements and check with the three credit reporting bureaus to monitor for fraud.Deputy Colonie Police Chief John Van Alstyne said his department was not involved in the probe. The Albany office of the U.S. Secret Service did not return a call for comment.Michael Della Villa, co-founder of Latham computer consulting firm Rockit Science Solutions, said computer networks often fall victim to traps laid for them even on seemingly benign websites.While it's common knowledge that seedier corners of the Internet devoted to gambling or pornography often carry malware — short for malicious software — that infects a computer and compromises its security, skilled hackers also attach those landmines to legitimate sites, Della Villa said."It could be a perfectly valid website, but a hacker hacked into the website and stored a snippet of code," he said. "There are so many ways that these bad guys can get into the system. There's nothing that's 100 percent fool-proof because these guys are making new viruses, new malware, new trojans every minute of every day."There may be no ironclad solutions, he said, but businesses can better secure themselves by installing web content filters that scan websites for dangerous bits of code and alert users before its too late. Companies also use firms like Della Villa's to "ethically hack" their networks, probing for weaknesses.Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Desmond-reports-serious-credit-card-security-3479978.php

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