When Iranian Hackers Hit Adelson’s Casinos

Billionaire casino magnate and major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson got attention last October when he was recording during a panel at Yeshiva University saying that the U.S. should nuke Iran. Specifically, he got the attention of Iranian hackers, who in return targeted his Las Vegas Sands casino operating company in Feb. 2014.

Now, Bloomberg Business Week has published an article digging into exactly what happened between Oct. 23, 2013, when Adelson made the remarks about Iran’s nuclear program, and Feb. 10, when hackers released malware into the Sands computer systems that wiped out three quarters of the company’s Las Vegas servers and would ultimately cost $40 million in recovery and repair.

“This was no Ocean’s Eleven,” Bloomberg Business Week reports. “The hackers were not trying to empty a vault of cash, nor were they after customer credit card data, as in recent attacks on Target, Neiman Marcus, and Home Depot.”

This was personal. The perpetrators wanted to punish the company, or, more precisely, its chief executive officer and majority owner, the billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Although confirming their conjectures would take some time, executives suspected almost immediately the assault was coming from Iran.

You can read the full story, published in the wake of this month’s massive Sony hack, here.

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