InterContinental Group is the next hotel chain to be potentially breached. Holiday Inn Parent IHG Probes Breach Claims is the article from Krebs and it was posted on the 28th of December.
I am starting to wonder what the difference iis between the desk where you check in and pay your money for the room, and the areas of the hotel where you can buy gadgets and other things they might sell. Why is only one portion of the hotel getting targeted?
It seems to me that if you really want to get data, the data would be at the main desk, would it not? Thats where the majority of the money is being put, correct?
I know when I last stayed at a hotel, I just told the restaurant to bill it to my room. I felt confident that way, and I didn’t have a problem. They approved over $400 to my card, even though the stay was $371 or maybe a little more. They said it was to cover any extra charges like TV, or other incidentals. For some reason, I just didn’t feel right billing for a meal or a snack separate, I just wanted one charge at the hotel, and I was happy that they could accommodate me in this way.
In the coming year, I am feeling like the hotels will even be targeted more. I’m not sure exactly how, but it may go as far as the front check in desk. I hope I’m completely wrong, and I only saw this one article in regards to this latest breach, and only time will tell on what is going to happen next.
Like I said in my prior article, at some point, our president and legislators will have to step in and start a process where hacking to get data and personal information needs to be made illegal. I’m not exactly sure how it should be done as of yet, but the process needs to start somehow. I’m happy to see legislators probe companies of big breaches to determine the scope of the problem, and thats a great start. I wonder if there is anything else they can do?
Please have your comments in the blog, and I’ll be in touch with you all soon.
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I am unsure why they wouldn’t target different places.
I mean you’d asume they’d all go to one central server or 2.
In which case why the fuck not target one of those.
The eft pos and other units may go somewhere else, maybe there are lines and servers for different places.
I do remember once staying in a hotel though and the computer rooms were open, ie you could happily walk in to the room at night or something, I mean there were a few guards but if you physically wanted to mess round with one you probably could.
Sadly I suspect that this will probably end the open wireless network thing where you can connect to hotspots without paying or getting some sort of login or something.
All these breaches, and hackers, all the copywrite and liability laws all of it is going to make our free net die quickly.
And it won’t solve anything if they want in, no matter what you put in front of them they will jolly well break it the fuck down.
I think the best way to deal with this is 2 fold maybe 3.
1. prevent as much as we can without compromising ourselves or those we serve.
2. where possible catch the worst offenders.
3. failing that, just aknowledge that it happens and just keep the numbers down.
I moderate a forum, and every day someone makes an account to post spam, try to hack the accounts, try to get in.
At first I tried to act on them bann everything, change passwords, do all the standard things.
Now every day I log on, fix the dammage, and keep the numbers down.
Its easier to do it that way.
I have spoken to the admin of the forum abut either fixing it or shutting it down.
But this may be one of these things we have to handle and delegate to the things we do daily like clearing our junk snail mail, we never complain about that and this may just be the form technology and the cybergods chuck at us, its a pain in the ass but there is little we can do about stopping it, especially if it continues to come back.
Sure we have caught a few bad people, great fucking deal, they come back.
In my view we should move from trying to prevent to much to just keeping the numbers down where we can.
Obviously if someone really gets persistant we should handle them but all this extra protection will just shoot us in the foot.
Look at our antipiracy system.
It has not helped against the real bad guys in fact its probably contributed to users to pirate.
Its really hard on those wanting to get in for lagit reasons to.
Even the so called privacy laws don’t allow for things unless spaciffic permition is sort.
Which is fine but if the user or users can’t physically do that or someone other close to them that has the varification even if they can varify things they can’t just get that info.
I can see where it works but it equally can be really bad to.
And if that is not enough it may be for one bit of info and then it can expire and it goes on and on.
I do think if we keep going on like this we will get to a situation where it becomes an endless loop.
It won’t stop the bad guys as such but say we have something bad come in say some invasion say we need to drop a bomb or access something important to do something.
We need to request info from 50 different people and each bit of info will expire in 5 minutes and we can’t get all that info with authorisiation from a few people 1 of which is dead, one of which is on the toilet, and one of which is having his lunch and won’t be off for 30 minutes.
And then it all expires and we need to enter info into 50 different computers with each file folder and system needing 50 different passwords to access.
And supposing we get in to that all and it all works we forget what we were doing and have to ask permition from another 50 different people to do each thing.
We are not quite there yet, but I can see the day that the world will end because we couldn’t make a simple decision without extras.
Being a tech you know what will happen, a computer would loop till resetting or just continously loop no matter what.
If our world does loop it will explode when all the nukes hit, but before that we will be so busy hitting keys and rebooting and everything that all computers will melt and we will be so busy fixing the issue which started the endless issue to fix that and so on we won’t notice at all.
I am not saying we shouldn’t not be secure but I am thinking we should stop, take all our security systems down shut it all down and really think what we actually are doing or have on stock.
I don’t think anyone is listening or looking.
I had people get into situation where they got a virus or issue and were told 20 different reasons and 20 different solutions to fix a single problem which turned out to be, a corrupted file, and a broken keyboard and mouse combo.
The file could be created, the mouse and board were cheap and could be replaced.
I had to end up reformatting 3 systems and uninstalling every bit of security software and clearing a lot of data just to get them to all work nicely then put back the basics, basic security, basic protection, basic config and build up from there.