Las Vegas Casinos Under Massive Cyberattack - Caesars Paid Ransom, MGM Didn't
Las Vegas is in the middle of a massive cyberattack that is leaving hotel residents locked out of their rooms, slot machines offline and credit cards not working, in what is one of the biggest digital attacks on such a high-profiled American entity.
The hacker group Scattered Spider is currently demanding a massive ransom in the form of tens of millions of dollars digitally transferred in order to stop the current ransomware attack on MGM Resorts International. The affected casinos included the MGM Grand, the Bellagio, and New York New York, amongst others.
The result has been absolute chaos - with hotel workers having to manually let visitors into their hotel rooms. Have you ever been to a casino? There's people everywhere. Imagine the frustration knowing that there's a person that has to let everybody in. The Bellagio has over 3,900 rooms alone and it's almost a the weekend and the beginning of the NFL season!
According to reports, the hackers gained access by taking over an employee's LinkedIn account and social engineering their way through the Help Desk. I'm sorry, but if the damn Help Desk is the last line of defense for a billion dollar enterprise like the MGM and Bellagio, then maybe they should look at themselves for being idiots. Is it really that simple? That's like having "123" as the password to open Fort Knox.
BUT WAIT...
Although the MGM attack is entering its fourth day, on Thursday, Caesars disclosed that they were also attacked by the same group weeks ago but suffered less consequences because they ended up paying the ransom! Reports say that Caesars paid about $15 million of the $30 million ransom.
Was it worth it?
$15 million is a hell of a lot of money for you and I, but Caesars Entertainment group did make $11.4 billion dollars last year, so a couple million to them is probably equivalent to just really fancy yacht trips. More importantly, they didn't face the public embarrassment as well as the bad optics like MGM is now going through.
MGM Resorts is currently experiencing a massive cyberattack. (Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
MGM has been very vague about the ongoing attack, only saying that they are still investigating and that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are now involved too.
Cyberattacks have become more prevalent in recent years with hackers gaining access to bigger and more important companies and agencies across the country. Everything from casinos to the much more real-life implication entities like hospitals have been victims of the attacks, with some paying and some not paying the ransom.
It's a dangerous trend that is only going to get worse as AI continues to expand and allow nefarious actors to impersonate voices, mannerisms and use deep fakes to trick the intended audience.
Life was much easier when all we had was 56K modems, Netscape, and AOL.