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American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

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Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#91

Post by mjburgess »

mojo74 wrote: post #68
marginalia_nu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, the hotel business seems pretty shady. My sense from crawling the web is that it's one of the areas that have the most blackhat SEO as well. Straight up linkfarms. This is sheer speculation, but I do think the hotel business is really convenient to get into if you have a questionable side-business and need to launder money. Who is to say if a room was occupied or not that night, if that foreigner who…

I think you have the makings of a new Netflix series there. I propose it be called Check In (or Cheque In for those of us in the UK).

I can't tell if you're joking -- but in the UK you "check in" to a hotel. A cheque is, specifically, a type of financial/banking note.

cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/check_in

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#92

Post by marginalia_nu »

mojo74 wrote: post #68
marginalia_nu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, the hotel business seems pretty shady. My sense from crawling the web is that it's one of the areas that have the most blackhat SEO as well. Straight up linkfarms. This is sheer speculation, but I do think the hotel business is really convenient to get into if you have a questionable side-business and need to launder money. Who is to say if a room was occupied or not that night, if that foreigner who…

I think you have the makings of a new Netflix series there. I propose it be called Check In (or Cheque In for those of us in the UK).

There's a lot of potential here. I'm thinking a slow burning Breaking Bad set up that sells itself as a light hearted Fawlty Towers-type show about a wide eyed Monopoly enthusiast fulfilling his dream, but with every season it gets darker and grittier and ends as a tangled web of international crime and corruption. Everything spirals out of control. The hotel is hosting a big conference and the minister of whatever is holding a keynote speech and the hotel is full of press, meanwhile the johannesburg arms dealers killed a prostitute that turned out to be an undercover cop and the body is still in their room, also there's a call from some really angry russian loan sharks, they're coming for their fucking money right now.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#93

Post by that_guy_iain »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #45
jb1991 wrote: post #27

This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…

For some reason, the hotel business seems pretty shady. My sense from crawling the web is that it's one of the areas that have the most blackhat SEO as well. Straight up linkfarms. This is sheer speculation, but I do think the hotel business is really convenient to get into if you have a questionable side-business and need to launder money. Who is to say if a room was occupied or not that night, if that foreigner who…

The entire travel industry is shaddy. I used to work for a price comparison site for holidays that had a side business as a travel agent. It was well known that none of the prices listed were the real price. Even with a rather generous staff discount being applied the sales agent was one surprised that it was just x over the listed price. They would say you were buying a package holiday but in reality they were just doing bookings for you via the standard public website for everything but the hotel. They would take the hotel payment first and then look at the price for the flights by which point you're already sold what the company sells and you need to pay for the flights no matter what. They'll then suggest that you do the transfer booking yourself to save money but it'll literally be the same price.

When I joined the first meeting my first day had people talking about how they got up at 2am and then 4am to make sure internal processes were still working. They had people who were barred from the office and were massive screaming matches if they came in which was mostly management yelling at people for talking to them.

On the money laundering aspect, I doubt this since most gangsters are busy with other businesses such as running taxis and bus services that are mainly cash businesses while hotels are mainly internet and card payments and largerly coming from business accounts unless it's a tourist spot.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#94

Post by mckirk »

kaba0 wrote: post #81
jb1991 wrote: post #27

This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…

> They’re not interested in anything but profit above all else Not disagreeing with you, but why is it a surprise to anyone? Any company that seems to be “nice” is only doing that as a good PR increases their profits, which depending on domain may be very important.

Any public company, perhaps. Private companies could decide to care about profit not as much and be genuinely 'nice' -- though the invisible hand would probably come along at some point and replace it with something more profit oriented.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#95

Post by sjaak »

smooc wrote: post #86
consp wrote: post #9

Interesting part from the Dutch version of the article: Booking is nooit eerder op spionage gestuit. Het bedrijf is er ook niet echt naar op zoek. Zolang die geen hinder oplevert, kost het geen geld. De onuitgesproken consensus onder specialisten binnen het bedrijf is: we vermoeden dat inlichtingendiensten meekijken, maar zolang we ze niet zien, maken we ons niet druk. Which roughly translates to We are not looking f…

The same goes for Banks, a.o. Dutch banks. They are a bit more picky though. Domestic and US is fine, Russian and Chinese is not.

Proof?

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#96

Post by [deleted] »

conjectures wrote: post #80
vmception wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I suggest such hackers are Russian just so the actual hacker isnt chased anymore because people are really gullible and will take that at face value. People imagine Putin signs the contracts himself.

The Wire nailed this with, "I'm not even Greek."

[deleted]

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#97

Post by Santosh83 »

seanieb wrote: post #28
dmix wrote: post #13

> The specific intelligence organization—of which the United States has 18—is unknown. This is a great factoid. Eighteen different IC agencies and countless contractors.

And they couldn’t estimate accurately how fast the Taliban was recapturing Afghanistan, a country they occupied for over a decade! Too many cooks in that kitchen!

Of course they could. Why are people this naive? Nevertheless the administration simply did not care. It was time to shift the theatre of war elsewhere and that's that.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#98

Post by misja111 »

smooc wrote: post #86
consp wrote: post #9

Interesting part from the Dutch version of the article: Booking is nooit eerder op spionage gestuit. Het bedrijf is er ook niet echt naar op zoek. Zolang die geen hinder oplevert, kost het geen geld. De onuitgesproken consensus onder specialisten binnen het bedrijf is: we vermoeden dat inlichtingendiensten meekijken, maar zolang we ze niet zien, maken we ons niet druk. Which roughly translates to We are not looking f…

The same goes for Banks, a.o. Dutch banks. They are a bit more picky though. Domestic and US is fine, Russian and Chinese is not.

This is nonsense. Source: I have been working in the cyber security department of a major Dutch bank.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#99

Post by mojo74 »

mjburgess wrote: post #91
mojo74 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have the makings of a new Netflix series there. I propose it be called Check In (or Cheque In for those of us in the UK).

I can't tell if you're joking -- but in the UK you "check in" to a hotel. A cheque is, specifically, a type of financial/banking note. cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/check_in

In the US I believe a Check is the same as a Cheque in the UK. Granted cheque is a homophone but both usages denote money (more so with the US title) with the added benefit of the connotation of arriving at a hotel. I am a big fan of puns.

Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent

#100

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

samhw wrote: post #88
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the assumption that the gathering storm was not noticed by various intelligence agencies is a wrong one. You had to not want to notice some of chatter online and I am talking about publicly available stuff like FB, Imgur and so on; nothing fancy. I think what I am saying is that it was allowed to happen, for one reason or another.

It feels a bit tin-foil-hattish (I mean: why?), but, aside from my stupefaction at the possible motivation behind why they would do that, logically I find it pretty hard to deny that conclusion. They identify AQ/ISIS plots which are far more competently organised. I have absolutely 0% confidence that they weren't aware of something widely organised on literal Facebook . -- Edit: The only other logical conclusion I ca…

Sorry for making it read like a conspiracy. When I typed allowed, I didn't want to ascribe any particular interpretation so I settled on that verb. In that sense, intelligence was gathered, reported and then something happened. I have zero problem believing it got lost in the shuffle as I have seen some big entities fail in that regard.

If more malicious interpretation is followed, your guess is as good mine. I am willing to accept a proposition that political considerations took over at some point.

We might find out come 2024 elections. Who knows given the odd times we live in.

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