A phone call to helpdesk was likely all it took to hack MGM::Slot machines and hotel room key cards stopped working at MGM casinos on the Strip.
They’re definitely about to rent the world’s largest bus to back over an employee
The helpdesk employee will be the scapegoat for sure, but it sounds like the corporate environment had poor security, which allowed this to happen.
Precisely. Ultimately the blame falls on company leadership for failing to drive security as a priority.
Ain’t all about the size of the bus, it’s about how many people are watching and cheering it on
Nah. The employee is probably not even an employee. Outsourced worker manning the helpdesk, based in Bangalore, perhaps. Haha.
Has anyone seen Danny Ocean?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A cyber criminal gang proficient in impersonation and malware has been identified as the likely culprit for an attack that paralized networks at US casino operator MGM Resorts International.
The operator of hotel casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, including the Bellagio, Aria, Cosmopolitan, and Excalibur, preemptively shut down large parts of its internal networks after discovering the breach on Sunday, one of the people said.
Slot machines stopped working, electronic transfers of winnings slowed down, and key cards for thousands of hotel rooms no longer functioned.
Scattered Spider is a relatively new entrant in the ransomware industry and has hit at least 100 organizations, most of them in the US and Canada, in the two years that Mandiant has been tracking it, said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at the Google-owned cyber security group.
Scattered Spider stands out from rivals among the Russian-speaking cyber criminal gangs that dominate the multibillion-dollar ransomware industry, which focuses on software attacks to encrypt or steal data and demand ransoms.
The gang learns about individuals from social media profiles in order to impersonate them and make phone calls in English to glean passwords or digital codes needed to access networks.
The original article contains 463 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This isn’t their first rodeo either. https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#MGM2022Update
