Pierluigi Paganini
December 13, 2014
On February 2014 the Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp suffered a major cyber attack, but only now the news was publicly disclosed by the Bloomberg Businessweek.
The attack has many similarities with the recent data breach occurred to the Sony Pictures and has caused serious damages to the company. Also in the case of the Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp, the attackers have compromised the company network, destroying thousands of servers and computers by wiping its hard disks with an aggressive malware.
Security experts believe that the hackers have operated a retaliation in response to the statement released by the chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp., Sheldon Adelson.
Sheldon Adelson is guilty to have made a statement against the Iranian Government in October 2013, the billionaire was at the Manhattan campus of Yeshiva University when he declared that a strike against the Iran was the unique way to definitively stop its nuclear program.
“What I would do,” Sheldon Adelson declared “would be to say, ‘Do you see that desert over there? I want to show you something.’ You pick up your cell phone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say ‘Ok let it go.’…Then you say, ‘See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran.”
The statement released by Adelson was transposed by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameeni, who replied to the US Government with the following statement:
“slap these prating people in the mouth and crush their mouths.”
In December of the same year, the hackers hit the network of the Las Vegas Sands and the offensive continued also in January, when the attackers gained access to the company’s virtual private network gateway at its slots casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
In February, the hackers compromised the Microsoft IIS development and staging server behind the website of the casino and used an open tool, dubbed mimikatz, to exfiltrate users’ credentials. The hackers discovered the credentials of a senior systems engineer who had visited the Bethlehem site from Las Vegas, then the attackers used them to compromise the corporate infrastructure and wipe out data on internal machines.
The hackers compromised the network and leaked the data online, including personal information, stolen email addresses and social security numbers of employees at Sands Bethlehem site.
The attackers also posted a message for the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp:
“I’m not going to confirm anything that was speculated or written in the Bloomberg story.” said Reese .
The experts of Dell SecureWorks that were hired by the Las Vegas Sands Corp to sanitize the company systems declined to comment the incident, anyway security experts exclude the direct involvement of the Iranian Government and attributed the attack to a group of hacktivists.
(Security Affairs – Iranian Hackers, Sands Corp Casino)
