The reporter, Iain S. Bruce, has yet to respond to questions about the matter that were sent to him via e-mail at his request on Tuesday. Included was a question about whether he had discussed the claim of 8 million victims with Best Western before his story was published.

It's reasonable for a company whose systems have been breached to make sure it fully understands the extent of what has happened before going public, said Chris Hoofnagle, senior staff attorney at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. "The general rule is that one should not disclose the breach until its scope has been determined," Hoofnagle said.

But even if Best Western wasn't fully aware of what it was about to be hit by when the Sunday Herald published its story, it's better for companies to disclose breaches before someone else does so for them, said Kirk Nahra, an attorney who specializes in data privacy and security issues at Wiley Rein.

Corporate executives often are hesitant to do so, Nahra acknowledged, noting that they have to think about different audiences when disclosing breaches -- including "lawyers looking to file lawsuits." But, he said, "the issue is how you control it. You do what you can to make it a one-day story, not a 10-day story."

It took Best Western until Tuesday to detail its version of the breach. In a statement issued that day, the company said the incident involved a compromised user ID that provided access only to data stored at the Berlin hotel. The ID was "immediately terminated," and a computer was "removed from use" after antivirus software found that it was harboring a Trojan horse program, Best Western said.

In addition to being scooped by the Sunday Herald, Best Western contradicted itself on how quickly reservations data is deleted from its systems. On August 24, it said the data is purged "promptly upon guest departure." But last Tuesday, the company amended that timing, saying the data is removed within seven days of checkouts.

Most businesses have defined internal processes for handling data breach disclosures, said John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner. But he said that Best Western officials may have been caught a bit off-guard because the system intrusion was revealed to them by a reporter who was looking to write a story about it and seeking immediate comment from the hotel chain.

The episode shows why companies should simulate various worst-case scenarios when they test their incident-response plans, Pescatore added. Best Western, he said, may have discovered what "many businesses learn the first time they actually have to implement their disaster recovery plan -- 'Oops, we should have had a dry run.'"