A very particular situation has played out in an Austrian 4-star hotel, Romantik Seehotel Jäegerwirt, which has ransomware written all over it. The virus has actually managed to lock all the EMF tagged doors, leaving all guests who were outside of their rooms stranded, reports indicate. The ransomware responsible for this actually wanted the people in charge to pay a ransom to revert the room access back to normal.
Hotel Pays 1.500 Euro
The worst news is that the hotel personnel were actually requested to pay a hefty ransom fee in BitCoin which was equal to around 1500 euros. Several interesting questions are raised after the ransom has been paid, such as why didn’t the hotel do anything when they have had attacks on their systems before?
This, being one of the top hotels in whole Europe, the staff had no choice, but to pay the ransom, since the computer system controlling those keys was hijacked and blocked by the criminals and this was their fastest way out.
However, experts always advise that paying is not a good solution because this may not result in the return of control over the system. And this is exactly what happened in that situation – after the ransom has been paid, the attackers left an open port to re-commence several breaches after that.
Luckily, the IT personnel at the hotel have detected the backdoor left and have taken measures to protect future breaches.
So far, the hotel staff is aware of other hotels also suffering different cyber-attacks, but this one is the first of it’s kind, this is why they have gone public and hence raised awareness for other hotel and organization personnel to be aware.
The bottom line and what you can draw from this is that with internet connection embedded more and more into technology, new type of protection mechanisms need to likely be developed and a more sophisticated control and management techniques will definitely be required in the future to stop cyber-criminals from performing such attacks.
Ventsislav Krastev
Ventsislav is a cybersecurity expert at SensorsTechForum since 2015. He has been researching, covering, helping victims with the latest malware infections plus testing and reviewing software and the newest tech developments. Having graduated Marketing as well, Ventsislav also has passion for learning new shifts and innovations in cybersecurity that become game changers. After studying Value Chain Management, Network Administration and Computer Administration of System Applications, he found his true calling within the cybersecrurity industry and is a strong believer in the education of every user towards online safety and security.
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