On September 10, MGM Resorts experienced what it called a "cybersecurity issue" that had a major impact on the company's systems, showing how cyberattacks can bring down applications, ultimately causing problems for a company in many ways.
According to Forbes, "The attack left hotel guests locked out of their rooms for hours and unable to use their digital key cards to charge goods and services. Eventually, the hotels resorted to manual processes and transactions."
The attack was first noticed by MGM Resorts on the evening of September 10. About 24 hours later the casinos were operational but the reservation systems was still down.
The company's website was also offline for at least 2 days.
In addition, the cyberattack impacted the MGM Rewards App and gaming on the casino floors. Las Vegas TV station KTNV reported, "Multiple gaming machines, including slot machines, have also gone offline due to the cybersecurity issue."
MGM Resorts has not yet disclosed which specific systems were impacted, and some of the downtime could be a result of the company shutting down its own systems to protect them, but the end result is still a disaster for the company. This attack shows how pervasive a cyberattack can be throughout a business operation.
In the latest episode of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast on DEVOPSdigest, Rick Sturm, CEO and Founder of Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) gave a stern warning to companies of all sizes. While speaking not specifically about MGM Resorts but more about cybersecurity in general, he said, "This stuff is rooted, to some extent, in corporate greed. Where management is always an afterthought, and security is even worse than that, it's way, way down. And we can save gazillions of dollars by connecting to the ... Internet, and security be damned, nobody will try to get in. And besides, we've got a couple firewalls. That should do it, right? No, it's not right ... We are seeing this over and over and over, and yet organizations are not taking the precautions that they need to. They take the quick and easy fix — they think. And ultimately, if you are connected to the Internet, you will be hacked, whether you're large or small."
On the podcast, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA added, "From the perspective of the network engineering team, it points to the fact that people don't have a lot of control over what's happening within their network. They don't see what's happening. It's about access control and segmentation. Like limiting lateral movement. Having a lot granular control over who can talk to what inside inside your network, and being able to understand if some kind of anomaly is popping up in terms of connections and communication. It requires a lot of manual heavy lifting from a network engineering team to be able to lock things down completely. And no one does it. As Rick was saying, part of it's greed, like no one wants to spend the money on it. Part of it is they don't have the tools to do it. And another part of it is they don't have the people to do it … It's a problem that needs to be solved."
Listen to Episode 27 of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast for more of EMA's take on the MGM Resorts cyberattack.
The Latest
App sprawl has been a concern for technologists for some time, but it has never presented such a challenge as now. As organizations move to implement generative AI into their applications, it's only going to become more complex ... Observability is a necessary component for understanding the vast amounts of complex data within AI-infused applications, and it must be the centerpiece of an app- and data-centric strategy to truly manage app sprawl ...
Fundamentally, investments in digital transformation — often an amorphous budget category for enterprises — have not yielded their anticipated productivity and value ... In the wake of the tsunami of money thrown at digital transformation, most businesses don't actually know what technology they've acquired, or the extent of it, and how it's being used, which is directly tied to how people do their jobs. Now, AI transformation represents the biggest change management challenge organizations will face in the next one to two years ...
As businesses focus more and more on uncovering new ways to unlock the value of their data, generative AI (GenAI) is presenting some new opportunities to do so, particularly when it comes to data management and how organizations collect, process, analyze, and derive insights from their assets. In the near future, I expect to see six key ways in which GenAI will reshape our current data management landscape ...
The rise of AI is ushering in a new disrupt-or-die era. "Data-ready enterprises that connect and unify broad structured and unstructured data sets into an intelligent data infrastructure are best positioned to win in the age of AI ...
A majority (61%) of organizations are forced to evolve or rethink their data and analytics (D&A) operating model because of the impact of disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to a new Gartner survey ...
The power of AI, and the increasing importance of GenAI are changing the way people work, teams collaborate, and processes operate ... Gartner identified the top data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2024 that are driving the emergence of a wide range of challenges, including organizational and human issues ...
IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most ...
Cloud spending continues to soar. Globally, cloud users spent a mind-boggling $563.6 billion last year on public cloud services, and there's no sign of a slowdown ... CloudZero's State of Cloud Cost Report 2024 found that organizations are still struggling to gain control over their cloud costs and that a lack of visibility is having a significant impact. Among the key findings of the report ...
The use of hybrid multicloud models is forecasted to double over the next one to three years as IT decision makers are facing new pressures to modernize IT infrastructures because of drivers like AI, security, and sustainability, according to the Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report from Nutanix ...
Over the last 20 years Digital Employee Experience has become a necessity for companies committed to digital transformation and improving IT experiences. In fact, by 2025, more than 50% of IT organizations will use digital employee experience to prioritize and measure digital initiative success ...
