Iran has been named as the perpetrator of an attack on a Las Vegas casino last year.
After the Sands hotel and casino chain was attacked in February 2014, James Clapper, US director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the attack was by Iranian attackers which hit many of the systems which help run the $14 billion operation.
According to Bloomberg, Clapper said that the destructive attacks demonstrate that Iran is a motivated and unpredictable cyber actor. He also further pinned the blame for the Sony Pictures attack on North Korea.
Attacks may include not only hacking but “supply-chain operations to insert compromised hardware or software,” Clapper said. At the same time, detection has improved so that attackers can no longer assume that their identities will stay concealed, he said.
“Rather than a ‘cyber-Armageddon’ scenario that debilitates the entire US infrastructure, we envision something different,” Clapper said in a report on global threats submitted to the Senate committee. “We foresee an ongoing series of low-to-moderate level cyber-attacks from a variety of sources over time, which will impose cumulative costs on U.S. economic competitiveness and national security.”
The Sands Hotel and Casino was demolished in 1996, while the group now owns the Venetian and Palazzo resorts in the city, as well as the Sands Expo and Convention Center.
During last year’s Black Hat and Def Con security conferences, held in Las Vegas in August, MGM denied that a cyber attack was to blame for a brief IT outage, telling IT Security Guru that it was “an IT issue” and definitely said “Confirming: no cyber attack.”
