no it won't.

The hotel knows what happened who did what and who was involved. The have to protect their ass with damage control. Same with stars


Well except they have to bypass, front desk, security, cameras, maid staff, and card keys. I agree with the rest of your post, but with all these things in place, its pretty hard to break in without inside help. Sure it can be done, but the risk isn't worth the reward without inside help, this ratio is what you pay 5 star hotels for i would think.


Ya! Maybe we should bycott stars and play on another big site like full tilt. Or if stars does nothing about this, we'll just play on stars and attend the same live venue next year.

Yep. Ritz carlton will have someone in charge of reading these reviews etc...

It will NOT be possible to hide 100+ reviews that all describe this thread....
Anyone who says the average person will not care about these reviews is not in touch with this world or the way the average person thinks

No way, you pay them for all the luxury. They'll do a little something to keep obvious scumbags out, but they aren't the damn Secret Service. Any minimally skillful confidence guy would have no trouble at all getting into any given hotel room. Plus, of course, you never know what the service folks are up to.

I've stayed in some pretty fancy places and never once said "Ahhh, I'm in a five-star place, NOW I can leave my valuables lying around!"

Sick story but yeah as others have said, frankly it's unbelievable that in your position you would leave your laptop just sitting there in your hotel room. Also not sure why you didn't make sure the police were notified immediately.

You're lucky that they messed up and you walked back at the right time, you should now be able to prevent any theft or fraud if you've taken the right precautionary steps.

Could have been a whole lot worse and you'd be spending months of time and $thousands on lawyer bills to sort it out.

wat?

You know they don't run play money games in b&m casinos? You have to bring your money along. You know a poker player was tasered by muggers while making his way to a taxi outside the casino? Stars have ignored the security issues in barcelona for years and deserve all the hate they get.

TMZ covered the divorce of Prahlad freakin' Friedman recently.

While this would not be front-page CNN news, I think plenty of media outlets would be interested in hotel break-ins, thefts, and laptop tampering at a five-star hotel assocaited with the Ritz, especially because it involves high stakes poker players. In general, the world is still fascinated with the poker lifestyle. This story would really take off if Pokerstars canceled future years of this and cited security concerns as reason for doing so.

I wasn't suggesting they give Pokerstars demand control over video material.

I was saying that they should have demanded a sensible explanation for what happened, backed with evidence. I was saying that Pokerstars should have held the hotel's feet to the fire for their initial lies about the cameras being broken. I was saying that Pokerstars should not have ganged up with hotel security on Jens and accused his innocent roommate of this, but rather examined the entire situation and realized that it was the hotel security acting shady, NOT Jens' roommate.

Only a complete idiot would read this story and think anything but, "Hotel security was either in on it, covering up, or massively incompetent."

Nobody would come away with the belief that Jen's roommate did it, so why did the security manager of Pokerstars?

Even if Pokerstars does have limited "power" (which I disagree with), they should have done everything they could, and then canceled their future plans with Arts if they did not get satisfaction. They did not do this. In poker terms, they were the epitome of loose-passive.

Or what you can actually do, if this has been happening on a large scale and several players or more have some degree of proof, and can also indicate it has exposed you to being defrauded out of millions of dollars (which it has) is look into filing a class action lawsuit. Marriott International is based in the USA, and we love suing companies here.

In before someone starts complaining about how impossible that is, and goes back to suggesting starting a Twitter war.

The embassy wouldn't give a ****, plus he's not even a tax payer I would guess?? I don't know if poker is regulated there.

+1 to the idea of telling the "maid" over the phone at what time she can clean, and just wait with a baseball bat in the bathroom.

Not sure if said yet, but a good way of identifying the rooms where the HR members were, was probably presenting yourself as a media team or something and try to fish something out of the employees. That way the hotel wouldn't really be in, just incompetent.

I'm not a card reader expert or anything, but 7-9 bits out of 24 seems like a pretty massive error rate. And, the last two bytes being identical could easily be because they represent something common--like the type of key it is or whatever. E.g., I have three credit cards whose first 4 digits are all identical.

If we ignore the last two bytes under the assumption that they're identical a reason, then ~8 bits of difference is exactly what you'd expect from two randomly generated 16 bit keys. That makes way more sense to me than a card reader misreading ~1/3 of the bits on a bad swipe.

Top tip (although not for everyone.)

If your laptop won't fit in the hotel safe, just put the hard drive in there. Removing the hard drive is a very easy 1 minute job.

This will protect you from all non hardware threats. In the case of standard theft, you don't lose all your information.

Scary stuff. Hope it works out.

I wonder if the key code's initial 3digits you and your friend have (45D) correspond to your floor and the other 3ED key digits correspond to a different guest on a different floor?

Arts hotel has someone that respond to every negative review made on trip advisor. I wonder what they will answer to "ours"

A couple of questions as there seems to be lots of laptop security experts around.

1. Many people have mentioned BIOS passwords itt. Are these not reset simply by clearing CMOS? That's the impression I get when I google BIOS password...

2. Do those built in fingerprint readers offer any significant security improvement in situations like these?

I'd like to see you get the hard drive out of my computer in 1 minute without throwing it on the ground and bending it into two pieces.

Getting the hard drive out of a laptop is definitely more than a 1 minute job on average

Didn't think I'd have anything to contribute to this thread, since I don't know anything about computers, hotel security, etc. But with so much uncertainty and speculation surrounding this situation ... something about that had me doing a google search, and a couple of interesting articles popped up:


Security Flaw In Common Keycard Locks Exploited In String Of Hotel Room Break-Ins (11/26/12)
Hotel Lock Hack Still Being Used In Burglaries, Months After Lock Firm's Fix (5/15/13)


Cliffs:

• somebody figured out how to make a device for $50 that opens a certain brand of hotel lock, used in about 4 million hotel rooms worldwide
• the guy who made the first device went and told a whole bunch of other people at a conference how to do it too
• a couple of months later, the Hyatt in Houston caught somebody who'd used the device to repeatedly break into rooms in their hotel, and he was arrested
• the company who makes the locks has offered a cheap patch for the locks that doesn't fully fix the problem, and a better one's available if hotels will pay extra for that, but it's pricey
• police in a lot of places are just learning of this device, as more incidents of hotel break-ins are getting reported
• apparently there's videos on youtube showing how to make the device

Hope they catch whoever did this

this for sure... my laptop doesnt even have access to the battery, let alone hard drive without taking the entire case apart. only thing that opens with screws is the ram.

dont they offer finger print readers for added security?

to whomever suggest jeans doesnt go get hammered tonight, making it this long seems hard enough. pretty deserved/necessary imo

Afaik cmos doesnt work on the newer Notebooks anymore..newer meaning a few Years old, I dont know exactely.There are Masterpasswords for sure,but I think they are somehow linked to the serial of the Notebook.Anyhow, its definately harder than if you have a simple Windows Password(boot from cd and access wout even needing the password at all).
But yeah,as has also been mentioned you should encrypt your Harddrive aswell.
Obviously nothing is or can be 100% safe if you run into somebody who is super skilled in such things, but I assume most scammers arent tbh.
Same things with firewalls, Im sure some People could get access to my Pc easily if they wanted to, but for the vast majority it makes it alot more difficult and I believe, thats whats the Goal.

Regarding Fingerprints etc. I dont know who well those are implemented since I dont use em myself, but with the assumtion that they need an OS to work, the same Problem arises as with the Windowspassword,it kicks in "too late" so to speak. Now,if you just have to set it up once and it saves into the Bios and you need it the Moment you want to turn your Notebook on, then its a different story.
But again, Im just guessing here since I dont use one myself and didnt look it up right now, I only know that its probably not working today aswell as it should,at least a friend of mine told me its a hassle for him often just to get it working.Like its his Notebook,his Fingerprints but he needs several tries for it to work or detect him as the owner.

Well this is why I said not for everyone, I'm sure there are laptops that are a little more difficult to get into. Everytime (approx 25-30 laptops) I have had to access the hard hard drive its been 4-6 screws (less than 10 seconds each) to remove the panel and then 1 screw to removes the hard drive. Only ever had the minor problem of worn screws, once.

Again, this not for everyone but might be useful for some. Don't want to derail.

Yes, BIOS passwords can be reset by clearing CMOS. However, that requires opening the laptop, and knowing the specifics of that particular laptop model.

Therefore BIOS password prevents installation of the malware using that laptop where the HDD is.

Fingerprint readers do not offer security against an attacker that uses external boot device (USB stick etc.) to boot up the laptop and install the malware from installation.

Full disk encryption is the best protection method.

Even if the Spanish Police get to see video evidence of 'unauthorized' people entering the room/s. I honestly can't see what can be done about it. (even if a specialist unit take on the case)


Police: Okay, we see them entering the room/s. What got stolen?

Hotel/Stars: Nothing got stolen. But we 'think' they put Trojans on our clients laptops in order to steal money from them at a later date.

Police: Right, we're going to need some evidence. Where are the laptops so our IT guys can take a look?

Hotel/Stars: Well, one is in Finland, another in the USA, and we believe two more are currently on route to Russia.

Police: Wait, so the only physical evidence you had, is now no longer on Spanish soil?

Police: You're drawing dead Mr Jones. Just chalk this one up shall we eh?

^Just because something was returned, doesn't mean it was not stolen

Doubt that's how the Spanish police will see it. And if they're bringing in the national police, then can't seem them pursuing a simple low value theft.


This is why this crime is so brilliant (in a criminals mind of course)

Like most cyber crime, the risk/reward is just to good.


Bottom line is that nobody is going to jail for this. And everybody knows it.

I'm not sure if this was posted before.......

Saturday September 07,2013 : POKER TOUR LAPTOP TAMPERING LATEST (Update)

Four players now known to be at risk

http://www.recentpoker.com/news/lapt...na-090713.html

+++100000