Locks at hotel rooms and homes used to be pretty straightforward. You’d have a lock and a key, you put the key in, turn it, and you’re in. These days smart locks are becoming a thing which while convenient, could potentially lead to situations like the one that a luxury lakeside hotel in Austria recently found themselves in.In a report from Motherboard, it seems that hackers managed to breach the hotel’s key card machine and prevented the hotel from generating new key cards. This means that guests who were checking into the hotel would not be able to access their rooms since their keys could not be generated.
The hack was of the ransomware variety which means that the hackers would only relinquish control of the system (or files) when the ransom was paid. It is not clear how much the hackers had demanded, but the system was finally back online after the hotel had paid the hackers around $1,600, which is admittedly a rather small fee considering that we’ve come across bigger ransom requests.
The initial report claimed that guests were locked in their bedrooms until the ransom was paid, but according to Romantik Seehotel Jägerwirt’s owner, Cristoph Brandstaetter, he said, “This is totally wrong. It was just a normal cyberattack and no guests were locked in.”