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MGM Resorts Incident Shows How Cyberattacks Impact Digital Performance and the Business

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

On September 10, MGM Resorts experienced what it called a "cybersecurity issue" that had a major impact on the company's systems, showing how cyberattacks can bring down applications, ultimately causing problems for a company in many ways.

According to Forbes, "The attack left hotel guests locked out of their rooms for hours and unable to use their digital key cards to charge goods and services. Eventually, the hotels resorted to manual processes and transactions."


The attack was first noticed by MGM Resorts on the evening of September 10. About 24 hours later the casinos were operational but the reservation systems was still down.

The company's website was also offline for at least 2 days.


In addition, the cyberattack impacted the MGM Rewards App and gaming on the casino floors. Las Vegas TV station KTNV reported, "Multiple gaming machines, including slot machines, have also gone offline due to the cybersecurity issue."

MGM Resorts has not yet disclosed which specific systems were impacted, and some of the downtime could be a result of the company shutting down its own systems to protect them, but the end result is still a disaster for the company. This attack shows how pervasive a cyberattack can be throughout a business operation.

In the latest episode of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast on DEVOPSdigest, Rick Sturm, CEO and Founder of Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) gave a stern warning to companies of all sizes. While speaking not specifically about MGM Resorts but more about cybersecurity in general, he said, "This stuff is rooted, to some extent, in corporate greed. Where management is always an afterthought, and security is even worse than that, it's way, way down. And we can save gazillions of dollars by connecting to the ... Internet, and security be damned, nobody will try to get in. And besides, we've got a couple firewalls. That should do it, right? No, it's not right ... We are seeing this over and over and over, and yet organizations are not taking the precautions that they need to. They take the quick and easy fix — they think. And ultimately, if you are connected to the Internet, you will be hacked, whether you're large or small."

On the podcast, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA added, "From the perspective of the network engineering team, it points to the fact that people don't have a lot of control over what's happening within their network. They don't see what's happening. It's about access control and segmentation. Like limiting lateral movement. Having a lot granular control over who can talk to what inside inside your network, and being able to understand if some kind of anomaly is popping up in terms of connections and communication. It requires a lot of manual heavy lifting from a network engineering team to be able to lock things down completely. And no one does it. As Rick was saying, part of it's greed, like no one wants to spend the money on it. Part of it is they don't have the tools to do it. And another part of it is they don't have the people to do it … It's a problem that needs to be solved."

Listen to Episode 27 of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast for more of EMA's take on the MGM Resorts cyberattack.

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 27

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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MGM Resorts Incident Shows How Cyberattacks Impact Digital Performance and the Business

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

On September 10, MGM Resorts experienced what it called a "cybersecurity issue" that had a major impact on the company's systems, showing how cyberattacks can bring down applications, ultimately causing problems for a company in many ways.

According to Forbes, "The attack left hotel guests locked out of their rooms for hours and unable to use their digital key cards to charge goods and services. Eventually, the hotels resorted to manual processes and transactions."


The attack was first noticed by MGM Resorts on the evening of September 10. About 24 hours later the casinos were operational but the reservation systems was still down.

The company's website was also offline for at least 2 days.


In addition, the cyberattack impacted the MGM Rewards App and gaming on the casino floors. Las Vegas TV station KTNV reported, "Multiple gaming machines, including slot machines, have also gone offline due to the cybersecurity issue."

MGM Resorts has not yet disclosed which specific systems were impacted, and some of the downtime could be a result of the company shutting down its own systems to protect them, but the end result is still a disaster for the company. This attack shows how pervasive a cyberattack can be throughout a business operation.

In the latest episode of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast on DEVOPSdigest, Rick Sturm, CEO and Founder of Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) gave a stern warning to companies of all sizes. While speaking not specifically about MGM Resorts but more about cybersecurity in general, he said, "This stuff is rooted, to some extent, in corporate greed. Where management is always an afterthought, and security is even worse than that, it's way, way down. And we can save gazillions of dollars by connecting to the ... Internet, and security be damned, nobody will try to get in. And besides, we've got a couple firewalls. That should do it, right? No, it's not right ... We are seeing this over and over and over, and yet organizations are not taking the precautions that they need to. They take the quick and easy fix — they think. And ultimately, if you are connected to the Internet, you will be hacked, whether you're large or small."

On the podcast, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA added, "From the perspective of the network engineering team, it points to the fact that people don't have a lot of control over what's happening within their network. They don't see what's happening. It's about access control and segmentation. Like limiting lateral movement. Having a lot granular control over who can talk to what inside inside your network, and being able to understand if some kind of anomaly is popping up in terms of connections and communication. It requires a lot of manual heavy lifting from a network engineering team to be able to lock things down completely. And no one does it. As Rick was saying, part of it's greed, like no one wants to spend the money on it. Part of it is they don't have the tools to do it. And another part of it is they don't have the people to do it … It's a problem that needs to be solved."

Listen to Episode 27 of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast for more of EMA's take on the MGM Resorts cyberattack.

Click here for a direct MP3 download of Episode 27

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...