MGM hotels hack sees 10.6 million customer accounts exposed

MGM Grand

The personal details of 10.6 million guests who stayed at MGM Resorts hotels have surfaced online after hackers accessed the chain's servers in July 2019.

Names, addresses and passport details for guests up to 2017 were spotted on a hacking forum by Under the Breach, a soon-to-be-launched data breach monitoring platform that reported the find to ZDNet.

MGM is the owner of a number of luxury in hotels in Las Vegas, and also elsewhere in the US, China and Japan. Its main Vegas hotel, the MGM Grand, is a popular destination for celebrities and often holds casino tournaments as well as the biggest boxing matches of the year - Tyson Fury will take on Deontay Wilder this weekend.

The company confirmed it had been attacked in July 2019 and that it had notified affected customers a month later. The source of the leak is said to be a cloud server, which ZDNet suggested was misconfigured. IT Pro has contacted MGM for comment.

"Last summer, we discovered unauthorised access to a cloud server that contained a limited amount of information for certain previous guests of MGM Resorts," the chain told ZDNet. "We are confident that no financial, payment card or password data was involved in this matter."

It is believed the personal information of high profile guests, such as Justin Bieber, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and FBI agents have been found on the forum.

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While this is a large breach, it isn't as big as the one suffered by the Marriott chain of hotels which saw Chinese state actors access personal details and payment records for 500 million guests after it failed to properly patch a database for its Starwood brand of hotels.

This is also the second report of hacking in Las Vegas this year after the city's security teams revealed they had thwarted a breach in January.

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognise him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.