"One of Europe's top hotels has admitted they had to pay thousands in Bitcoin ransom to cybercriminals who managed to hack their electronic key system, locking hundreds of guests out of their rooms until the money was paid."*
The coincidence of timing suggests that the recent malware attack on a luxury hotel in Austria was highly organized:
Interestingly, the hotel went public with the story in order to alert others to the issue, being aware that colleagues at other establishments had suffered the same fate already. As we have seen elsewhere, however, paying the €1,500 ransom is not the end of the story and is not the full extent of the cost. One of the consequences of the attacks was the replacement of hardware and, significantly, the de-coupling of some systems. In addition, when the hotel is refurbished next, the electronic room locks will be replaced by locks with physical keys as a further prevention.
The significant cost and customer impact of these types of attacks is being seen across many industries and business types. It is not limited only to small businesses and invariably does not impact just one user. Education of those users is an important factor to limiting the chances of attack but ultimately the simple, last line of defence is overlooked raising the level of risk immeasurably.
In terms of backup, mitigating the risk is simple:
Some Backup Exec next steps:
* The Local, 28th January 2017
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.