When you go on a getaway, you hope to have a good time. But things don't always turn out the way you would like. And if not ask these travelers who last week went to the Alps to spend a few days in a luxury hotel . And it's not that the buffet food was bad, or that towels were missing in the bathroom. Nothing is further from reality. Everything that happened was because of technology. The story that we want to tell you today occurred in different rooms of the idyllic Romantik Seehotel Jí¤gerwir hotel , in Austria , when a group of hackers hijacked the key management system , leaving hotel guests unable to use the cards to access their respective rooms. The worst of all was that,As the system was completely hacked , the hotel managers were also unable to reprogram the cards so that guests could normally access the rooms. The reservation system and the cash register also failed . It is what could be defined as a disaster of stay. A nightmare vacation.
According to the European media The Local , the hotel had no choice but to try to solve the problem quickly so as not to leave poor guests stranded. And what did this mean? Well, he had to face the ransom demanded by hackers through Bitcoin . In total, the establishment had to pay 1,500 euros . Once this amount was paid (which is almost insignificant compared to what hackers have requested in other attacks), the system was reset again and the clients of the Romantik Seehotel Jí¤gerwir were able to return to their rooms as if nothing had happened. . Of course, the hotel managers realized that the hackers had left a back door openby which to go back in again, lock the system and ask for a new ransom. Luckily they noticed the trap.
After the attack, the hotel managers rushed to replace the current systems and disconnected certain computers to prevent attacks from occurring again in the future. And it is not the first time that this has happened, although not precisely in this hotel. Last year we had news that several of his patients were locked in their rooms , under $ 17,000 blackmail by the attackers. A Canadian university also had to pay a whopping $ 20,000 to be able to unlock its network, at the hands of another group of hackers.
The attack is nothing more than a warning to surfers against the increasingly popular ransomware threats . In this sense, it is advisable to reinforce the security infrastructures and do it thoroughly to avoid setbacks like this.
The hotel managers have decided that they will return to traditional systems , so despite being a luxury establishment, from now on they will use traditional locks and keys, as they did more than a hundred years ago, when the hotel first opened. its doors . One and no more, Saint Thomas.