The latest breach
The protection of sensitive data is becoming more and more of a concern for individuals and businesses alike. Trusting third parties with personal information is something that people now consider carefully and companies must ensure that their security protocols are up to scratch.
Major breaches will hit the headlines and the casino sector has been subject to its fair share of cyberattacks recently, with the Las Vegas Sands-owned Marina Bay Sands being the latest impacted property.
The casino revealed in a statement on Tuesday that a hack has exposed the personal data of approximately 665,000 members of its shopping loyalty program. The company became aware of the hack on October 20, the day after the breach.
Casino members appear to be safe
Marina Bay Sands confirmed that an unknown third party accessed the names, phone numbers, email addresses, membership numbers, and residence country information of shoppers. The company is not aware of any misuse of the data following the hack and it does not appear that people who are part of the casino rewards program have been impacted.
Marina Bay Sands is now bolstering its security systems with the help of a cybersecurity firm to ensure that nothing similar happens again. Nobody has claimed responsibility publicly as of yet for the attack.
Nobody has claimed responsibility publicly as of yet for the attack.
Marina Bay Sands informed the relevant authorities about the hack and it will be contacting anyone impacted. A number of other notable institutions in Singapore have been the victim of cyberattacks recently. Numerous public healthcare bodies were subject to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack last week, causing internet outages for about seven hours.
An ongoing issue
Some of the other notable casino companies that have been dealing with cyberattacks as of late include MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment. The latter’s Caesars Rewards program was breached, leading to the data exposure of over 65 million members. The casino company reportedly paid a $15m ransom to the attackers.
MGM Resorts suffered extensive disruption at its Las Vegas properties following its own attack. Its computer systems were significantly impacted, but the company refused to pay any ransom.