Another day, another cyber-attack! In early April, Omni Hotels & Resorts was the victim of a cyber-attack that brought down the entire IT system and led to a company-wide outage. The organization took immediate action and brought the entire network offline to isolate the issue, protect its data and prevent further damage from occurring. Unfortunately, this process heavily impacted the hotel\u2019s operations and day-to-day functions, such as managing reservations, unlocking hotel room doors manually and using point-of-sale (POS) systems in restaurants and shops within the hotel. Some estimates expect this attack to cost the Omni over a million dollars. While unconfirmed by the hotel, several sources speculate that the type of cyber-attack was a ransomware attack similar to what happened to MGM in Las Vegas several months ago.<\/p>\n
While most customers were aware of the inconveniences of the Omni outage, many weren\u2019t aware of the dangers associated with cyber-attacks. When a network is compromised, unless you have high-grade tools to protect you, every device you connect to is put at risk. When you\u2019re traveling, it\u2019s important to treat everything like a risk to ensure your safety. In today\u2019s article, we\u2019re sharing a couple of tips to keep you safe when you\u2019re on the road for work or even on vacation this summer.<\/p>\n
These tips will help protect you, but if you travel for work or have employees who travel for work, it\u2019s important that all work devices have professional-grade cybersecurity tools installed on them. You don\u2019t want to send your sales team to a hotel-hosted trade show, and instead of bringing back a list of leads, they bring back malware that could shut down your company altogether.<\/p>\n
There is one final lesson in this terrible incident that all Dallas-Fort Worth business owners need to understand: No matter the size of the company, you can still be the victim of a cyber-attack. The Omni chain, which boasts over 50 properties nationwide, would likely have a large budget to defend itself from cyber-attacks and yet still fall victim to hackers. No system is 100% impenetrable, but small business owners who don\u2019t have any security measures in place are putting a big red target on their backs.<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t have a cybersecurity system in place, or if you do and someone else is managing it but you\u2019d like a second opinion, we offer a FREE Security Risk Assessment. This assessment will go over every area of your network to identify if and where you are vulnerable to an attack and propose solutions to fix it.<\/p>\n