Nordic Choice hotel chain switched to Chrome OS after ransomware attack

Daniel ZimmermannJanuary 13, 2022

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Scandinavian hotel chain Nordic Choice suffered a ransomware attack last month. Now, after the incident, the company said it switched all affected systems to Chrome OS for the sake of protection.

Nordic Choice, which owns more than 200 hotels in Northern Europe, fell victim to a ransomware attack in early December. Then the hackers encrypted some of the company’s internal systems using the Conti malware. The attack prevented hotel staff from gaining access to booking data and issuing key cards to newly arrived guests, The Record reported.

By the way, you might be interested in the article: Symantec: Booking hotels and online check-ins on flights are unsafe.

As representatives of Nordic Choice have now reported, the hotel chain did not contact the hackers to pay the ransom, and carried out system recovery after the attack in a very interesting way: the entire fleet of machines that previously worked with Windows was transferred to Chrome OS.

In less than 24 hours, the first hotel went live in Google’s Chrome OS ecosystem. Over the next two days, another 2,000 computers were refitted across the entire company of 212 hotels in five countries around the world.an official press release says.

For the migration, the company used the CloudReady tool, which helps prepare and transfer data from computers running Windows and macOS to Chrome OS. Moreover, even before the attack, Nordic Choice was testing a pilot program to switch to Chrome OS in order to possibly save money in the future (by reusing old computers with a less demanding OS).

When we suddenly had to face a cyber attack, the decision to go all-in and accelerate this project was made in a matter of seconds.the company says.

Now Nordic Choice plans to transfer 2,000 more computers to Chrome OS and expects to save about 60 million NOK (51.6 million rubles) by transferring machines to Chrome OS instead of buying new equipment.

The hackers behind this attack have already realized that they will not wait for payment and are now “leaking” files stolen from Nordic Choice on the darknet. According to the company, this data may contain the names of hotel guests, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of visit and other information that guests may have provided about themselves. The cybercriminals failed to steal payment information.

Hotel chain Nordic Choice