Breach of privacy? Las Vegas hacker convention attendees subjected to room inspections

Not the welcome they were expecting; attendees at a Las Vegas cybersecurity conference had their hotel rooms at Resorts World inspected daily. They were in town for DEF CON 32, the world’s largest underground hacking conference, held this year at Las Vegas Convention Centre. Casino-hotel Resorts World apparently viewed attendees as a potential security risk, and not without reason – other casino-hotels on the Strip have experienced cyberattacks in the past. The attendees had mixed reactions to the incident. Some understood the casino’s concern. Others felt they were unnecessarily branded as criminals. “(Security) had no idea what they were looking for,” Korvin Szanto, of Portland, Oregon told the Las Vegas Review Journal. “They knocked and came in, and showed me a big, long list of stuff that they wanted to look for. It had things like random cables and a USB thumb drive. I said, ‘You have these things’.” Szanto wasn’t overly upset by the inspections. He said that other Las Vegas casino-hotels had done the same thing in previous years. Other guests weren’t so magnanimous. Matti Raubasojia of Finland said his hotel room had been searched while he was out. “I don’t know what they’re looking for anyway,” he said. “(But) the conference covers both sides of cybersecurity. A lot of the guys (there) are also defending attacks, like the MGM case or whatever they’re using to justify this.” Raubasojia was referring to a notorious 2023 incident. The two biggest casino-hotels in the Strip, MGM and Caesars, were attacked by cyber criminals. Caesars reportedly paid a $15m random to avoid disruption, while MGM bit the bullet and suffered weeks of operational malfunctions. Chandler Emhoff, from Ohio, found that the searches showed caused confusion more than anything else. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” he said. “They say they’re looking for some sort of hacking tools or something like that. But what does that look like? It could look like anything. It could be my computer, you know. And like I said, I don’t think they would know what they’re looking for. Even if they did see something, I don’t think they would know it.” “It’s kind of an invasion of privacy. (They’re) stereotyping us as criminals because we’re here for a hacker convention.” DEF CON 32 concluded on 11 August. The next edition will be held in 2025.