Las Vegas Sands is working with law enforcement to investigate the sophisticated intrusion that took down its corporate and property Web sites on Tuesday.
The sites were still down today, Hong Kong time, and The Associated Press reported that Nevada regulators and the FBI had joined the probe.
“Company-operated Web sites have been hacked, as have some office productivity systems,” said spokesman Ron Reese, who told the Las Vegas Review-Journal it was not known how long the sites would be out of service. He said the outage also affected Sands’ e-mail capabilities in the US. It was unclear if any customer information had been compromised. The company’s corporate site, as well as the home pages of its casinos in Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, Macau and Singapore, displayed a screen saying they were undergoing maintenance and providing phone numbers for the properties.
It appears the attack is connected to Chairman Sheldon Adelson’s outspoken support for Israel and militant opposition to Iran’s nuclear program. AP said the Morning Call, a newspaper in Allentown, Pa., posted screenshots of the sites before they were taken down that showed a picture of Mr Adelson posing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a message condemning the use of weapons of mass destruction. The page included a map of the world with flames where Sands has US casinos and scrolled personal information about employees, including e-mail addresses, job titles and Social Security numbers.
Mr Adelson has spent enormous sums on national elections in the United States to influence policy in favor of Israel and against the creation of a Palestinian state. He was the largest individual donor to political action committees and other independent groups in the 2012 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks campaign spending. Speaking at Yeshiva University in New York in October he advocated a nuclear attack on Iran, which Mr Reese later characterized as “hyperbole”.
Mr Adelson has returned to the spotlight more recently with a heavily financed campaign to halt the spread of Internet gambling in the United States. Online gambling is legal in three states, including LVS’ home state of Nevada, but a group funded by the billionaire is lobbying in Washington for a federal ban.
The day before the sites were hacked, the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, as the group is known, posted an anti-Web gambling ad on YouTube. The group was reported to be planning a press conference this week to announce support from dozens of organizations.
RelatedPosts
