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Hackers Who Attended Black Hat and DefCon Conferences Say Hotel Security Personnel Demanded Access To Their Rooms (the-parallax.com)
More than two dozen hackers and security experts who attended security events last week say security personnel at the Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Caesars Palace, Flamingo, Aria, Cromwell, Tuscany, Linq, or Mirage hotels had entered their rooms. Security news site The Parallax reports: Except for Tuscany, which is independent, all of these hotels are owned by either Caesars Entertainment or MGM Resorts International. And of the three hotel companies, only Caesars returned a request for comment. Richard Broome, executive vice president of communications and government relations for Caesars Entertainment, whose Caesars Palace is co-hosting DefCon this year with the Flamingo, said that following the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history last year, "periodic" hotel room checks are now standard operating procedure in Las Vegas. On October 1, 2017, from his room at the Mandalay Bay, Stephen Paddock used semiautomatic weapons he'd outfitted with bump stocks to kill 58 people and wound at least 527 others attending a gated country music concert on the Strip below. [...] Two apparent Caesars security officers wearing hotel name tags displaying only the first names "Cynthia" and "Keith," respectively, as well as sheriff's style badges that looked like they came out of a Halloween costume kit, visited my room while I was writing this story. Cynthia told me that they are instructed to refer to the front desk guests who decline to allow their room to be searched.
After Cynthia and Keith declined to disclose their last names to me, I asked what they intended to do in the room. They told me that they would enter it, type a code into the room's phone line to signal that it's been checked, and then do a visual spot check. When I asked what they would be looking for, Cynthia replied, "WMDs -- that sort of thing." Other conference attendees reported similar but less pleasant interactions. Katie Moussouris, CEO of Luta Security, wrote on Twitter that two hotel security personnel were "banging" on her room door and "shouted" at her. She also said the hotel's security team supervisor "dismissed" her concerns over how the hotel was treating single, female travelers. Google security engineer Maddie Stone tweeted that a man wearing a light-blue shirt and a walkie-talkie entered her Caesars Palace room with a key, but without knocking, while she was getting dressed. "He left when I started screaming," she wrote, adding that a hotel manager, upon her request, said Caesars would look into whether the man was actually an employee. Stone tweeted that she left DefCon early because of the incident.
After Cynthia and Keith declined to disclose their last names to me, I asked what they intended to do in the room. They told me that they would enter it, type a code into the room's phone line to signal that it's been checked, and then do a visual spot check. When I asked what they would be looking for, Cynthia replied, "WMDs -- that sort of thing." Other conference attendees reported similar but less pleasant interactions. Katie Moussouris, CEO of Luta Security, wrote on Twitter that two hotel security personnel were "banging" on her room door and "shouted" at her. She also said the hotel's security team supervisor "dismissed" her concerns over how the hotel was treating single, female travelers. Google security engineer Maddie Stone tweeted that a man wearing a light-blue shirt and a walkie-talkie entered her Caesars Palace room with a key, but without knocking, while she was getting dressed. "He left when I started screaming," she wrote, adding that a hotel manager, upon her request, said Caesars would look into whether the man was actually an employee. Stone tweeted that she left DefCon early because of the incident.
Simple - Why on earth would you use that place to host your customers if that's how they're going to be treated.
I'd get the f*ck out of there and never come back.
Shooting the guy who entered while she was dressing would have helped educate him and others for the future...
IANAL but I googled and it seems that NV has a stand your ground law, which does require that the defender not be the original aggressor. That is, chasing down young black men and then shooting them when you claim to feel threatened is not permissible, but shooting someone who enters your domicile and threatens you is. Policies vary on whether you may carry firearms into your hotel room, but the law does not prohibit it, and appears to permit you to defend yourself.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When that shooter was allowed to carry all that hardware, unchecked, and massacred all those innocent people, that was a hotel fuck-up.
It's not like the guy was just strolling through the lobby with a couple AR-15s with 100-rd drum mags slung over his shoulder. He brought them in in bags. Even the number of bags he used, if they could even passively track how many bags he actually had, isn't excessive for Vegas with all the conventions, meetings, etc. So unless you think hotels need to start doing bag checks or xraying everything there's not much they can do.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil