The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians announced on its Facebook page on Friday afternoon that refused to pay hackers the ransom they demanded in the wake of the security breach that happened last month. The tribe confirmed that some customer data had been stolen in the attack and that it will be helping affected customers to protect themselves.
Back on Feb.9, the tribe closed all five of its Kewadin Casinos on the Upper Peninsula. The closures lasted for more than two weeks. The Manistique, Christmas and Hessel locations are the final facilities to open, scheduled for today, in a phased re-opening process.
Tribe Chairman, Austin Lowes, said he is not willing to pay the ransom to the cyberattackers. He explained his decision on the tribe’s Facebook page:
“After much deliberation, we have determined there is no point in paying their ransom demand. We made this decision based on two key reasons:
“First, our internal IT team worked closely with external cyber experts to restore our systems and recover virtually all of our data.
“Second, there was no guarantee we would have received what was promised. We could have paid their ransom and still had our data shared on the dark web.”
Update on potential information stolen in the attack
Since the tribe announced the cyberattack, it had not provided any update on the severity of the breach, neither the potential information stolen. Lowes finally addressed it in the post, stating:
“We’ve begun the process of reviewing that stolen information so we can reach out to those who have been impacted and provide free credit monitoring services.
“This review will take time, though, since our team must manually review hundreds of thousands of documents to determine what information may have been stolen and who that information belongs to.”
The tribe is planning to reach out to those affected by the security breach, and will be provided with a free credit monitoring services. It did “strongly encourage” customers to begin the process of protecting themselves now with the following steps:
- Contact your credit card provider so they can monitor suspicious behavior on your accounts.
- Change your email and passwords to your financial accounts.
- Place a free fraud alert and/or credit card freeze on your accounts.
It remains to be seen whether or not Sault Ste. Marie Tribe is going to face any repercussions of allowing a security breach. Rivers Casino Philadelphia in Pennsylvania is going through a similar issue and is now facing a class action lawsuit because of it.
