It did not suffer public outages and may have paid the hackers to avert any major disruptions. “A lot of help desks have metrics on being able to resolve an incident quickly.”Ĭaesars Entertainment, which rivals MGM in Las Vegas and runs the Tropicana, William Hill, Harrah’s and its namesake Caesars, was also hacked last week, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Thursday. “They typically try to get a password reset by calling the help desk: ‘I’ve been traveling, I’ve just come back from vacation’ - some sort of a ruse that’s plausible enough,” she said. She declined to comment on who might be behind the recent casino attacks. She said the hackers are masters of social engineering, which is the practice of fooling people into giving up information that can be used to take over the accounts of key people at victim companies. Wendi Whitmore, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, said her company is investigating multiple breaches connected to the hacker group.

The breach has become one of the most high-profile in recent years, a particularly public and flashy example of the ongoing scourge of cyberattacks and ransomware deployments that have waylaid police stations, hospitals and schools, alongside major businesses.Ī person familiar with the attacks said the hackers behind the Las Vegas intrusions are members of a group that the cybersecurity industry often refers to as 'Scattered Spider.'Īnd while many hacker groups employ varied hacking techniques to wreak havoc on computer systems, this group’s entry points can be decidedly low tech: phone calls and online chats with tech support.

On Friday afternoon, MGM announced that while some systems were still affected by the attack, 'the vast majority of our property offerings currently remain operational.' The MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas. MGM employees were still unable to access their corporate emails as of Friday morning, a worker who was not authorized to speak for the company told NBC News. MGM Resorts, which runs many of the most popular casinos and hotels in Las Vegas including the Bellagio, Aria and Mandalay Bay, is still scrambling to recover after hackers significantly disrupted its operations earlier this week, leading to shutdowns on casino floors and hotel guests unable to use key cards to enter their rooms.

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