Did the CrowdStrike debacle create problems for the Vegas casinos?

You have reported thoroughly on the effects of the malicious hacking at MGM. Did the recent CrowdStrike debacle create any problems for the hotels or casinos in Las Vegas?

Relatively few, compared to the scene at Harry Reid International Airport, where 48 flights were canceled and 229 were delayed and the problems went on for at least a week. However, that doesn't mean that casinos and hotels were unaffected.

Slot machines at Green Valley Ranch went into tilt mode, displaying error messages. CrowdStrike failures also affected the casino’s management system, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that slot payments had to be made by hand, a return to the old days when players waited a long time for their money.

“Station Casinos was affected by the global outages,” the company admitted. “The company had a temporary outage late Thursday night due to a third-party vendor, lasting a few hours.”

Cyberattack victims Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International, however, shrugged off CrowdStrike. So did the Venetian, Treasure Island, and Wynn Las Vegas. Less fortunate was Red Rock Resort (Station again), whose in-house video monitors displayed “The operating system on your PC failed to turn off properly and needs to be repaired.” However, all other systems were reported to be operating normally.

Given the number of stranded air passengers, you would think the city’s myriad hotels would have reaped a benefit. But victimized passengers were loath to leave Reid International, lest they should miss a rescheduled flight. Even sleeping on the floor was deemed preferable to a soft hotel bed.

So the casinos really dodged a bullet where CrowdStrike was concerned. But that’s cold comfort to the thousands of Vegas visitors who were marooned at Reid and got a Sin City experience they will never forget, not to mention the many locals whose travel plans were disrupted or canceled (like those of our ace researcher Paula).

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O2bnVegas Aug-23-2024

staggered deployment

While I'm at almost zero zip level re IT, I plowed through a piece about the "Crowdstrike debacle."  I personally shiver and quiver when my cell phone or computer or anything messages me that an 'update is ready'.  Usually has buttons to click, to "Update Now" or "Notifiy Me Later".  Intuitively (best guess) I never "Update Now", thinking I'll let the bugs or other flaws in the updating system show themselves first before affecting my own device.  Probably doesn't make make much difference, since after time passes and I haven't clicked on the "Update Now" button the update occurs remotely anyway.  But that's about all I know to do, as "staggered deployment", which they didn't do in this case, was mentioned as one of the company's proposed strategies to minimize damage when a flaw is identified.

Candy

jay Aug-23-2024

Delta

Delta Airlines has a class action suit against Microsoft and CrowdStrike. The fix was relatively easy. You had to boot the server into safe mode, and subsequently delete the updated file in the crowdstrike directory below the windows directory. 

In the case of Delta they had 40,000 servers running windows. The majority of the other airlines used a Linux operating system and were unaffected.

The Delta CIO said that both CrowdStrike and Microsoft should have tested better before releasing the update. The reason Microsoft was implicated in this is that parts of Microsoft Azure that support customer tenants were affected. 

While I believe Crowdstrike made a boo-boo Microsoft was as much a victim of this as anyone and because it only impacted Windows it is also a reputational impact to them. If anything Delta might be able to get service level credits out of Microsoft but not remedy via class action.

Joseph Merritt Aug-23-2024

Gold Coast

It took an hour or more to get paid out on a slot machine at Gold Coast.  

The machines would take your money but would not print a cash out ticket.

sunny78 Aug-23-2024

watch out

- Intuitively (best guess) I never "Update Now", thinking I'll let the bugs or other flaws in the updating system show themselves first before affecting my own device.-

Candy, that's a VERY bad idea. Updates are often fixes for security flaws that will only 'show' when someone hacks into your system. Ignore updates you open up your device to hacks. Updating security patches asap is key. 

Best to you.

Question of the Day - 23 August 2024

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