Here’s How To Travel Safely
Another day, another cyber-attack! In a recent incident, early April, Omni Hotels & Resorts fell victim to a cyber-attack, resulting in a complete shutdown of their IT system and causing widespread disruptions throughout the company. Swift action was taken to mitigate the situation, with the organization promptly shutting down the network to contain the breach, safeguard data, and prevent further harm.
Regrettably, this proactive measure had a significant impact on the hotel's operations, affecting essential functions such as reservation management, manual room door unlocking, and the use of POS systems in on-site establishments. The financial implications of this attack are substantial, with projections indicating potential costs exceeding a million dollars.
While most customers were aware of the inconveniences of the Omni outage, many were not 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’re traveling, it’s important to treat everything like a risk to ensure your safety. In today’s article, we’re sharing a couple of tips to keep you safe when you’re on the road for work or even on vacation this summer.
- Don’t connect to the public Wi-Fi in the hotel. Truthfully, this also applies to coffee shops, airport lounges, etc. If a network is compromised and you connect to it, you could be giving hackers access to your devices.
- Turn off the auto-connect feature. Even if you don’t actively connect to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, if a hacker has set up a fake Wi-Fi network and your device auto-connects to it, that could be a big problem. Shut the feature off and only manually connect to sources you trust.
- Use your phone’s hotspot. Instead of connecting to public Wi-Fi, most cell phones come equipped with a hotspot that allows your other devices to connect to your phone’s internet. If not, one call to your wireless provider can often add this feature.
These tips will help protect you, but if you travel for work or have employees who travel for work, it’s important that all work devices have professional-grade cybersecurity tools installed on them. You don’t 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.
There is one final lesson in this terrible incident that all of our local 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’t have any security measures in place are putting a big red target on their backs.
If you don’t have a cybersecurity system in place, or if you do and someone else is managing it but you’d like a second opinion, KRS IT offers 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.
Click here to book your Security Risk Assessment with one of our cybersecurity experts, or if you’d like, you can always email/call us at our office at: info@KRSit.com, 201.402.1900.