Another day, another cyber-attack! In April, Omni Hotels & Resorts was the victim of a cyber-attack that brought down the entire IT system and led to a company-wide outage.
The organization took immediate action and brought their network offline to isolate the issue, protect its data and prevent further damage from occurring. Unfortunately, this process heavily impacted the hotel’s operations and day-to-day functions, such as managing reservations, unlocking hotel room doors manually and using point-of-sale (POS) systems in restaurants and shops within the hotel.
This attack is estimated to cost the Omni Hotels over a million dollars. While unconfirmed by the hotel, several sources speculate that the type of cyber-attack was a ransomware attack similar to what happened to MGM in Las Vegas several months ago.
While most customers were aware of the inconveniences of the Omni outage, many weren’t aware of the dangers associated with cyber-attacks. When a network is compromised, unless you have high-grade tools to protect you, every device you connect to is put at risk. When you are traveling, it’s important to treat everything like a risk to ensure your safety.
In today’s article, we’re sharing a couple of tips to keep you safe when you’re on the road for work or even on vacation this summer.
- Don’t connect to the public Wi-Fi in the hotel. This also applies to coffee shops, airport lounges, etc. If a network is compromised and you connect to it, you could be giving hackers access to your devices.
- Turn off the auto-connect feature. If your device automatically connects to a compromised fake WI-FI network, it can put your data at risk. Shut the feature off and only manually connect to sources you trust.
- Use your phone’s hotspot. Instead of using public Wi-Fi, turn on your phone’s hotspot and connect your device to it. If you’re traveling abroad, purchase a sufficient data plan for your phone which can be used for your laptop as well.
These tips will help protect you, but if you travel for work or have employees who travel for work, it’s important that all work devices have professional-grade cybersecurity tools installed on them. You don’t want to send your sales team to a hotel-hosted trade show, and instead of bringing back a list of leads, they bring back malware that could shut down your company altogether.
There is one final lesson in this terrible incident that all SERVICE AREA business owners need to understand: No matter the size of the company, you can still be the victim of a cyber-attack. Even though the Omni chain boasts over 50 properties nationwide, and is likely to have a large budget to defend itself from cyber-attacks, it still fell victim to hackers. No system is 100% impenetrable, but small business owners who don’t have sufficient security measures in place are putting a big red target on their backs.
If you don’t have a cybersecurity system in place, or if you do but you’d like a second opinion, we offer a Security Risk Assessment. This assessment will examine every area of your network to identify potential vulnerabilities that could lead to a damaging cyber attack.
