Hackers said they did it “for fun” when they attacked Holiday Inn, a part of Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG).
BBC reported that the IHG identified the hackers as a Vietnamese couple who erased significant amounts of data after attempting a ransomware attack, which failed. It was quickly discovered by hackers that the password to the FTSE 100 company’s database was Qwerty1234.
As proof that they had carried out the hack, TeaPea sent screenshots through Telegram, an encrypted messaging app. It appears that they gained access to IHG’s internal Outlook emails, Microsoft Teams chats, and server directories, which IHG has confirmed are genuine.
Originally, we planned to use ransomware, but the company’s IT team kept isolating servers before we could deploy it, so we thought we’d do something funny. We performed a wiper attack instead,” one hacker said. Data, documents, and files are irreversibly destroyed by wiper attacks. A criminal hacker’s vindictive side is highlighted by this case, according to an expert.
