“This is totally wrong,” hotel owner Cristoph Brandstaetter told Motherboard. “It was just a normal cyberattack and no guests were locked in.”Motherboard continued:
The main problem, according to Brandstaetter, was the hotel was unable to issue new key cards to guests who arrived during the 24 hours that the hotel’s reservation system was down. Ultimately, Brandstaetter was forced to pay the ransom after failing to secure help from the police....Rest is fine.*
Original post:
From The Local (Austria) 28 January 2017:
One of Europe's top hotels has admitted they had to pay thousands in Bitcoin ransom to cybercriminals who managed to hack their electronic key system, locking hundreds of guests in or out of their rooms until the money was paid.
Furious hotel managers at the Romantik Seehotel Jaegerwirt, a luxurious 4-star hotel with a beautiful lakeside setting on the Alpine Turracher Hoehe Pass in Austria, said they decided to go public with what happened to warn others of the dangers of cybercrime.
And they said they wanted to see more done to tackle cybercriminals as this sort of activity is set to get worse. The hotel has a modern IT system which includes key cards for hotel doors, like many other hotels in the industry.
Hotel management said that they have now been hit three times by cybercriminals who this time managed to take down the entire key system. The guests could no longer get in or out of the hotel rooms and new key cards could not be programmed.
The attack, which coincided with the opening weekend of the winter season, was allegedly so massive that it even shut down all hotel computers, including the reservation system and the cash desk system.
The hackers promised to restore the system quickly if just 1,500 EUR (1,272 GBP) in Bitcoin was paid to them.
Managing Director Christoph Brandstaetter said: "The house was totally booked with 180 guests, we had no other choice. Neither police nor insurance help you in this case.
"The restoration of our system after the first attack in summer has cost us several thousand Euros. We did not get any money from the insurance so far because none of those to blame could be found."
The manager said it was cheaper and faster for the hotel to just pay the Bitcoin....MOREEarlier today:
"Click Here to Kill Everyone"
*'Rest is fine' is one of the categories of newspaper corrections that Craig Silverman of the formerly stand-alone Regret the Error, which moved to Poynter, uses. Here's an NYT example from 2007, emphasis mine:
An art review in Weekend last Friday about “Paradise in Print,” an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx that includes images of breadfruit, included a number of incorrect historical references to the works.
Britain’s plan to export breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies in the late 18th century eventually succeeded; the plan was not abandoned after the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty, although that ship’s breadfruit cargo was lost.
During the mutiny, the Bounty was sailing near the Tonga archipelago; it was not then in Tahiti.
The author of an 1820s text on medicinal plants that includes an engraving of a coffee plant that is on display was François Pierre Chaumeton — not Pierre Turpin, who executed the engraving.
The creator of an 18th-century image of a basket of fruit in the exhibition was William Jowett Titford, not Georg Dionysius Ehret.
And the artist of an engraving in a 1685 treatise on coffee by Philippe Sylvestre Dufour is unknown; it is not directly attributed to Dufour. Link
Rest is fineHere's one of the corrections at Poynter:
New York Times column used quote from fake news site ‘without attribution’
...added (as an Editor's Note):We highlighted a Reuters correction in 2012:
An earlier version of this column was published in error. That version included what purported to be an interview that Kanye West gave to a Chicago radio station in which he compared his own derrière to that of his wife, Kim Kardashian. Mr. West’s quotes were taken, without attribution, from the satirical website The Daily Currant. There is no radio station WGYN in Chicago; the interview was fictitious, and should not have been included in the column.
It's best if you can do it right the first time but if that doesn't happen you've got to fess up to the facts.At least it's not as egregious as:
From a Reuters story, yesterday:
(Editing by David Lindsey and Eric Walsh)Rest is fine.
(Removes words "and at times has had difficulty paying his mortgage," paragraph 7; removes "he did not make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan" and instead states "he did not pay down the balance of a $100,000-plus student loan," paragraph 10; removes "he was caught up in an Internal Revenue Service Investigation" and instead states "his name surfaced in an Internal Revenue Service investigation," paragraph 12; removes "voted against Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee" and instead states "opposed President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor," paragraph 41; removes "voted against Obama's healthcare overhaul" and instead states "opposed Obama's healthcare overhaul," paragraph 41)
Newspaper Retracts Editorial on Gettysburg Address
From Poynter:
In 1863, the Harrisburg, Pa. paper then known as the Patriot & Union published an editorial about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.Here's today's Patriot-News:
They panned it:
We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of....
...In the editorial about President Abraham Lincoln’s speech delivered Nov. 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, the Patriot & Union failed to recognize its momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. The Patriot-News regrets the error.
...MOREFinally, possibly greatest of all time from the Ottawa Citizen:
Hey, at least they used the proper "regrets the error".
“The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wish to apologize for our apology to Mark Steyn, published October 22nd.
In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Steyn, published October 15th, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction.HT: Jay Leno
We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable, and we apologize to Mr. Steyn for any previous distress caused by our previous apology.”
