A Scandinavian hotel chain that was hit by a ransomware attack last month said it took a new approach by switching all affected systems to the Chrome OS operating system to recover from the incident, Slashdot reported.
According To The Record:
Nordic Choice Hotels, which operates 200 hotels in northern Europe, fell victim to a ransomware attack on December 2, when hackers encrypted some of its internal systems with Conti ransomware. As a guest at the hotel told The Record in an interview last month, the attack left employees unable to access guests’ booking data and issue key cards to new arrivals.
But in a press release today, Nordic Choice said the hotel had not contacted the hackers or negotiated decryption keys to unlock infected devices, opting instead to migrate its entire fleet of PCs from Windows to Chrome OS.
In less than 24 hours, the first hotel was running on Google’s Chrome OS ecosystem. And over the next two days, 2,000 computers across the company were converted, including 212 in five different countries. hotel,” the chain explained. Before the attack, the hotel had run a pilot project to test the tool as a way to save money by repurposing older computers and less demanding operating systems, said Kari Anna Fiskvik, vice president of technology at Nordic Choice Hotels.
So when we suddenly had to deal with a cyber-attack, we decided within seconds to go all out and speed up the project, Fiskvik said. Nordic Choice said the base of 2,000 computers it planned to migrate during the attack and migrate another 2,000 computers to Chrome OS. The hotel chain said it expects to save $6.7 million by converting older computers to Chrome OS rather than buying new hardware.