A Houston-based Hyatt is one of a handful of hotels in Texas targeted by digital tools that effortlessly open electronic door locks in a matter of seconds, according to a published report.

In September, Janet Wolf, a 45 66-year-old IT services consultant for Dell, returned to her locked room at the Hyatt in Houston's Galleria district to find her Toshiba laptop stolen, Forbes reported on Monday. Management for the hotel later concluded the thief accessed the room by exploiting a vulnerability in the electronic door lock provided by Onity. The exploit was unveiled at this year's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, and it affects some four million locks. It works by inserting the plug of a custom-made device into the port of an electronic lock to access the digital key that in turn accesses the opening mechanism.

The investigation into the burglary came around the same time that insurance firm Petra Pacific issued an alert claiming that "several" Texas hotels had their locks picked using the hacking technique, which was developed by researcher Cody Brocious. A director at Petra told Forbes there are at least three such hotels, but he declined to identify them.

Representatives for the firm that owns the Houston-based Hyatt told Forbes it implemented a fix for the vulnerability following the burglary, about two months after reporter Andy Greenberg first alerted Onity to it. Even then, the fix amounted to putting "epoxy putty" into a small hole in each hotel room lock until management puts in place a more permanent solution. Brocious said in an August blog post that "mechanical" approaches are a good temporary fix but suggested they aren't good long-term solutions because they rely on security through obscurity.

The only way to permanently fix the locks, according to Forbes, is to replace the circuit board of each vulnerable lock. That's something Onity is asking hotel customers pay for rather than covering the costs itself.