Cascades Casino cybersecurity attack may have breached personal employee information

Gateway Casinos hack still causing trouble Current and former Cascades Casino employees received notice their personal information may have been hacked. Sijia Liu explains.

Current and former employees of Cascades Casino in Chatham are being warned their personal information may have been breached following a recent cybersecurity attack that shut down the casino for several weeks.

Casino staff received a letter from the company last week about possible “unauthorized access to personal information.” The letter states the company is “not aware of any misuse of personal information at this time.”

“Once a breach occurs, your information is essentially out there in cyberspace,” explained cybersecurity expert Ritesh Kotak. “Cyber criminals leverage your information. They try to sell your information because there is value to your data. The risk to individuals could be everything from identity theft, somebody getting loans under their name, all the way to breaches in other forums that require certain pieces of information.”

To help ensure personal information is not used inappropriately, Gateway is providing employees with a credit monitoring and identity theft protection plan for 12 months free of charge.

A statement from Gateway said the company "immediately took steps to contain the incident" including closing its Ontario locations and severing internet access. The investigation remains ongoing.

"We will continue the work with our expert advisors to determine if any personal information of customers was impacted, but to date the independent forensic investigation that has been proceeding since April 16 has not uncovered theft of any sensitive patron personal information," the statement said.

The company said it is also keeping law enforcemnt, regulators and privacy comissioners updated on the investigation.

Some services included in the plan are access to an identity restoration specialist, daily credit monitoring, local wallet assistance and identity theft insurance.

“Once your information is out there, it is out there forever. There's really nothing you can do about that,” said Kotak.

However, Kotak says there are steps you can take after the breach to protect yourself — such as enabling account notifications, monitoring your accounts, having credit monitoring services, all the way to something as simple as using different email addresses.

On April 16, Gateway Casinos became aware of a cyberattack that rendered some of its systems inoperable. The company shut down all of its Ontario locations and severed internet access. Since then, the casinos have gradually reopened and Gateway is working to restore its IT systems.

Kotak explains the three steps companies should take after a cyberattack:

Step 1. Stop the bleeding. Take your systems offline to identify exactly what is compromised, and what may have occurred.

Step 2. Conduct forensic audits. There are specialists that can look at logs to test systems. The last thing you want to do is go back online with the vulnerabilities still existing.

Step 3. Continuous testing and vulnerability assessments. It is a long and expensive process. Unfortunately that is the only way to ensure the system can safely come back online and doesn't occur in the future.