👉 Background: MGM Resorts is one of the big names on the Las Vegas casino strip - it owns the Bellagio, Aria and Cosmopolitan hotels.

👉 What happened: Now, MGM Resorts have suffered a real-life Ocean's Eleven Heist. All of the hotels and casinos in the MGM stable have had a major outage as a result of a 10-minute phone call.

👉 What else: It was the ultimate use of social engineering. The hackers:

• Found an employee on Linkedin with the right credentials
• Impersonated the employee and called MGM's tech help desk to change their password.
• Logged into that account and uploaded malware on the casino's systems.

As a result, slot machines were down, ATM machines were inoperable and hotel concierge were checking in customers with pen and paper.

What's the key learning?

💡The most vulnerable part of any security system is the person sitting behind it.

💡Normally, we hear about the technical way in which a hacker uncovered a gap in a company's security systems. But social engineering is the non-technical way of manipulating people to reveal confidential information. Think: passwords, login details, access points.

💡Given MGM Resorts earned $3.9 billion USD in revenue for the most recent quarter... that's around $44 million per day. And that's a LOT of money to be losing due to a cyberattack.

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