LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — MGM Resorts officials are unveiling more information about the cyber attack that hit Strip casinos about three weeks ago.
On Tuesday, Bill Hornbuckle, the CEO & President of MGM Resorts International, spoke at the G2E conference and said the hack could have been a lot worse.
"It's corporate terrorism at its finest. We don't wish this on anybody," Hornbuckle said. "We saw it early so we had good indicators on the ground. By day two, we knew they were there. We reacted quickly to protect data. You saw us shutting down systems by our own design. What ended up happening is the criminals understood what was happening and they shut the balance of it down for us."
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Like many guests and employees saw, the four or five days after the attack led to some headaches.
"We found ourselves in an environment where we were completely in the dark. Literally, the telephones, the casino system, the hotel system, the key system, I could go on and on, weren't functioning," Hornbuckle said. "You put the company to the test. I'm at the age where many of these systems weren't automated to begin with. You suddenly find yourself going this is what you need to do at the front desk. This is what you need to do here. It was an interesting cultural moment for the company."
Hornbuckle said MGM did not pay ransom to the hackers in order to get their systems back online.
"Because it happened so quickly, we were already in defense mode. We were playing, from the first day, whack-a-mole. Don't let them here. Let's do this. Let's do that," Hornbuckle said. "They never got into the core system. They got into the DNS layer. They got into the communication layer. It's going to take us as long to figure it out anyway, even if they gave us encryption keys, so let's just move forward and put us, when we get through this, in a much better place."
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The incident was due to the hackers socially engineering their way into the system and it's something Hornbuckle said the company will address.
"We have two call centers. We have a call center for things like when a machine is broken and we have a tech call center, which is for the technical crew. That's the layer that got engineered, if you will," Hornbuckle said. "How that process works going forward needs to be rethought and redone. The way you structure your environment, in terms of pillars, keeping them where if they got into one, they don't get into all, that's critical infrastructure."
Hornbuckle added he was proud of MGM employees who protected critical data. For example, he said despite the scale of the hack, no banking information or credit card information got out. The hack is estimated to cost MGM Resorts $100 million. However, Hornbuckle said cyber insurance will cover it.
"I can only imagine what next year's bill will be," Hornbuckle said.
In the wake of other companies being hacked like Caesars Palace, which did pay a ransom, and Clorox, Hornbuckle said companies in all industries need to be prepared for an attack like the one that hit MGM.
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"Moving forward, it's about reinvestment into infrastructure, people, and processes. It's not just our company. Their ability to strangle business is pretty meaningful," Hornbuckle said. "These threat actors and other threat actors continue. They're always here. You have to be vigilant about it."
