One of the 19th century’s greatest minds was dragged kicking and screaming back into the 21st century when Las Vegas Sands fully restored its Web sites. No more horse-and-buggy rides or reading by candlelight for Sheldon Adelson. It’s back to the present. The ongoing mystery over who struck at Sands’ Internet presence testifies both to the number of Adelson’s enemies but — in this interest — their persistence. “Cybersecurity experts say it could have taken several months for so-called hacktivists to complete an attack on Sands’ networks,” wrote The Associated Press‘ Hannah Dreier, in a chilling sentence. Whoever’s got it in for Sheldon, they’re patient — and they struck deeper than ever previously thought.
It’s too soon for Sands to take a victory lap. Employee e-mail is still down and it’s unknown what (or how much) sensitive customer information was snagged. After undergoing the cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor (with Sands in the role of the U.S. Pacific Fleet), Adelson’s flunkies haven’t been pointing fingers at anybody else’s Internet problems. For instance, in Atlantic City, the alliance of Virgin Casino and the Tropicana Atlantic City has encounter payment-processing and geolocation difficulties. “They have certainly improved, although they’re not near where we’d like them to be,” GameSys CEO Lee Fenton (who makes Virgin’s games) ‘fessed up.
The industry is pivoting toward online gambling at the very time that customer surveys show a growing preference for the convenience of wagering via mobile devices. Forward-looking 
casinos like Borgata are already enabling play on Android smart phones, as well as accepting wi-fi connections. Online revenues in New Jersey grew 28% last month and that’s with some casinos (most notably the Golden Nugget) still not having strapped on their helmets and gotten into the game. Yet the Nugget’s expectations are nothing if not aggressive: 20% of all revenue in 2014 and 50% by 2018. The biggest worry appears to be cellular networks that can tricked out or “spoofed.” That being said, the growth in casino Web sites and enrolled players (up to 200,000) in New Jersey shows that this is a phenomenon that Washington, D.C. cannot curb, no matter how much it might wish it so.
