What Cyber-Crime Group Was Responsible for the Recent MGM Casino Attacks?

What's going on with this MGM Casino and Resorts hack attack? So it's really interesting when we start to look at this. It came out on Monday, but it didn't come out publicly on Monday. It just came out amongst social media that there were issues with the MGM Casino Resorts in Las Vegas, that people weren't being able to check into their hotel rooms. There was issues with people trying to play the slot machines and to play electronic gaming, as well as some of the lights and different functionalities that were digitally driven inside of the casinos. So that all started to surface on Monday, the September 11th. Now, the major media didn't touch it until Wednesday night, two and a half days later and really didn't come out with anything until Thursday. So it made me start to think, why would they not be talking about this and what's going on? So I dug a little bit deeper and I realized, you know, MGM, this is a company that's publicly traded. Their stock is, you know, the market cap right now is $14.4 billion. So this isn't just some small $100 million company, but this is a massive conglomerate with casinos and resorts all over the world and primarily in the United States. So interestingly enough, this hack came a few days after Caesars Entertainment, which is another casino based company, was hacked on the East Coast in their Atlantic City property. Caesars had ransomware that was attacking and went into and stole all the information from their customer list for their rewards program. So they got social security numbers. They got all kinds of things off of their rewards program and hacked in. Now the ransomware and the gang of cyber attackers basically told Caesars, hey, we'll return the data. We'll stop attacking your infrastructure digitally if you give us a $30 million payout. Now Caesars returned by saying, we'll give you $15 million and then let us reestablish our digital connections to all of our customers and so on and so forth. So they actually settled this agreement with this group. Now there's some controversial people claiming for the group and the best way I can say is like the group they say in one report is called Scattered Spider. Another report is known as UNC3944 Group of Hackers or Roasted Octopus. And then there's another one that's more famously known as ALPHV. So the thing that happened in Caesars was actually reported to be done by Roasted Octopus UNC3944. But they ended up paying these guys $15 million to restore the functionality of their databases. And a couple of days later, they attack MGM. Now they've also put out to MGM that they want money from them. No one's really, I haven't found any data that says how much they're asking from MGM or what's going on. But you know, my first thought is anybody that's a cyber attacker that's extorting companies, you're pretty much going to be a terrorist is how I look at it. Now here's a post from VxUnderground that talks about how what's going on. They compromised MGM, this tweet or X, whatever you want to call it now, and says basically that all ALPHV ransomware group did to compromise MGM resorts was hop on LinkedIn, find an employee and then call the help desk. That's according to this tweet or X post right here. I think that's kind of ridiculous. I guess you could hack into a system through an employee's account. But to shut down things like their slot machines, their key card entries, the lights inside of some of the rooms, completely eliminate all the gambling that's going on on the floor. It's pretty extensive to say they got in through just an employee because certain employees aren't even going to have access to that kind of security anyway. So I think that post or tweet is more or less non-relevant, but ultimately it comes from the same group of people that are claiming this other Caesars attack. But again, these guys paid $15 million to someone who basically held their company ransom. In my book, they're a terrorist. Why isn't there this massive outcry amongst the media, amongst our congressional representatives, our politicians, the FBI, CIA, anybody? Why aren't they exposing this and then targeting it? What's really going on in the background? And why is it not being put into the light that it should be? Because of the fact that we're being attacked cyber wise through all of our things. What's to say that they just don't hack into the FAA and start playing with that? What's to say they don't hack into the SEC and start playing with the exchange commissions in the United States and start pulling money from here and money from there? If they can get into MGM, what's stopping them from really coming into the larger or other businesses that hold personal people's monies? And why isn't the United States taking more initiative to come after this entire type of criminal organization? That's my question. And I really don't see them taking a lot of moves. It wasn't even put onto the news. So I view that they control pretty much all of the major media out there. So at this point, that information wasn't pushed to the major media until three days after it actually happened. And I wasn't even convinced that it was going to get to the media because I think they wanted to resolve it before it got to that level like Caesars. Caesars attack happened on September 7th and it was resolved a couple of days later because they gave them $15 million. So this came after the $15 million was received and now they're attacking MGM. It's still going on right now. It's September 15th, Friday. So that's pretty interesting to really look at and to think about and to think that there's not a lot of protection when it comes to these individual companies and being attacked and actually holding our data. You know, if you're a member, a loyalty member with MGM, a loyalty member with Caesars, your information's being taken and basically held for ransom. So as a country, we should definitely make this a priority, create some type of cyber task force. I'm sure we have something, but I doubt it actually is effective.