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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 5, 2017

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REAL LIFE NEWS: HOTEL HELD TO RANSOM BY HACKERS

by Hazed

Cyber criminals targeted a hotel recently but rather than using ransomware to just lock up their data, they locked all the doors.

The Romantik Seehotel Jaegerwirt in Austria started to have a problem when guests found they were locked out of their rooms. They complained that their electronic keys weren’t working, and staff were unable to produce new ones.

Then the hotel received an email containing a ransom demand. The hackers had infiltrated the electronic key system and the hotel was locked out of its own system.

Guests were left stranded in the lobby, and the reservation system was paralyzed. This was at the peak of the skiing season and the hotel was at maximum capacity, with 180 guests, so it was a catastrophic situation.

The email demanded a ransom of two Bitcoins, which equates to about $1,800, and warned that the cost would double if the hotel did not pay up by the end of the day. Given the severity of the attack the hotel owner decided he had no alternative: he had to pay up.

Electronic door locks are all very well but perhaps it would make sense to have some kind of backup in case of problems… like… an old-fashioned physical key!

This is going to be more of a problem as essential functions shift to being controlled by computers. People with “smart homes” run through Amazon’s cloud service found that out a few days ago – when the service went down, it not only blacked out websites, but also prevented smart home owners from turning on their lights. This wasn’t because of hackers, just a computer glitch.

I suspect we are going to see more and more stories like this.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/world/europe/hotel-austria-bitcoin-ransom.html?_r=0
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/01/amazon-web-services-outage-smart-homes

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