21 ms·

Room inspections at Resorts World confuse, annoy DEF CON attendees

322 points by jarsin 2y ago

rolph 2y ago
why not actually, attend the convention, and learn how to perform security related procedure, rather than alienate the people most apt to help, and educate in the context of computer security. start with learning what hacking is, and talk about "living off the land" using field expedient improvised tools and materials.
- petre 2y ago
  Sure, educate the mall cops about USB thumb drives.
devwastaken 2y ago
The "inspection" was reportedly carried out in a threatening and illegal manner that held attendees against their will and coerced them to give up private belongings. The DA should prosecute the "security staff" for their illegal acts and make an example out of them. This is not the first time a hotel has done this, and they will continue to act outside the law until those responsible face felonies and prison time.
- bigiain 2y ago
  > The DA should prosecute the "security staff" for their illegal acts Ha ha. In _Vegas_? Not in this timeline. The DA is _not_ on your side in this fight.
  - bankcust08385 2y ago
    That's okay. That's what the Feds are for when there is state-level corruption. (When Spotting the Fed may actually also be useful.)
philwelch 2y ago
https://archive.is/CqCfj https://archive.is/CqCfj
illuminant 2y ago
Well I remember the times I went to (single digit) Def Cons. Cement in the toilet, sizable portions of the hotel lost power, haxors taking the event room doors off their hinges, those plotting to exploit the digital signage. Vegas + hacker cons, everything one might expect.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  As a more recent attendee, it's not like that at all anymore. The edgiest you'll get is some graybeard thinking they're "alt" and "punk" while advocating for checking IDs at registration and having quite literally identical political views to Brenda from HR. The attendees have overall been insanely passified, I presume a side-effect of the rapid growth and number of straight-lace SWE guys there because of their employers. Even this year, you will be trespassed from the con for putting up _googly eyes_ and there are 4-6 different villages dedicates to "break-times" and inclusivity. Probably for the best, no way a truly "edgy" and zany hacker con would've been able to find venues to host at nowadays anyway.
  - no_time 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - therealdkz 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - zer8k 2y ago
    > Probably for the best, no way a truly "edgy" and zany hacker con would've been able to find venues to host at nowadays anyway. Best for business, perhaps. I stopped going several years ago when the conference got too soft. Yes, the antics were sometimes too much and it's understandable why SOME THINGS would need to be reigned in. For example, concrete in the toilets, flares in the elevators, windows getting broken, ATMs being hacked etc. 100% understandable. The defcon today is completely sterilized. It's an extension of corporate culture in it's truest sense. There's no interesting things going on anymore. The noted "inclusivity" breakouts and villages are growing, the goons are more serious, the "hackers" are mostly Joe's From Accounting, etc. Part of the allure of old defcon was everyone was just a hacker. It never, ever mattered who you identified as or what you were. Can you hack? Great, you're in. Everyone serious never gave names and cameras were very seriously frowned upon. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. If I'm being honest it's gone from the high point of my year to something I'm glad is just a memory for me. I went for ~15 years. It's sad to watch it turn into this sterilized "dont offend anyone or anything" after being counter-culture for decades. But, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I'm once again glad I didn't spend the money to go.
cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
Undoubtedly some ‘security’ higher up trying to build their little fiefdom and expand their corporate influence. The absolute hilarity of the mere concept of this does distract me a bit from how invasive it is. Like, what do you think that you’re looking for? What’s cause for suspicion? They’re almost certainly just looking for large quantities of ‘computer stuff’ in a single room. Aside from like, large antennas, I really can’t imagine what correctly ‘looks’ sketchy.
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  What is the problem with having lots of computers in a room anyway?
  - jen20 2y ago
    God help them during Re:Invent.
animitronix 2y ago
[flagged]
- reaperducer 2y ago
  Lol I wish I'd been there just so I could sue the ever-loving shit out of everyone. They literally would have had to arrest me. It's Vegas. The laws are different than in other places, especially in hotels that have casinos, and especially along the Strip, which is Clark County, not Las Vegas. The casinos have 80 years of experience dealing with disruptive people. Think mobsters, terrorists, foreign governments, and the occasional tiger roaming the hallways.
- mrandish 2y ago
  > I wish I'd been there just so I could sue the ever-loving shit out of everyone. Perhaps you are unaware that most of the hotel contracts you've ever agreed to have provisions whereby you have already agreed the hotel has the right to conduct inspections of the room you're renting upon giving you advance notice. So you'd have no grounds to sue anyone. Before assuming a reflexive posture of belligerent bluster, and threatening to "sue the ever-loving shit out of everyone" it's advisable to pause and inform yourself whether you're about to be completely in the wrong. > They literally would have had to arrest me. I suspect if you pointlessly wasted their time with ridiculous threats and were annoying to boot, they'd be more than happy to arrange that.
  - hansvm 2y ago
    > Perhaps you are unaware that most of the hotel contracts you've ever agreed to have provisions whereby you have already agreed the hotel has the right to conduct inspections of the room you're renting upon giving you advance notice. You've been at hotels with that sort of contract in place? Where? The only things I've ever had to sign before taking possession of the room are a pet policy and something affirming they're actually allowed to use the card on file to pay for damages. Those documents are short and to-the-point, and I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think a "no dogs on the bed" clause is likely to grant random detentions and inspections.
firesteelrain 2y ago
The Venetian conference rooms and suites were used to ‘hack’ a satellite last year during Hack a Sat Finals. There were no issues. It is right next to the Caesars Convention Center. I know this is a new venue so maybe they are a little trigger happy
mrandish 2y ago
They have to know the glorified mall cops doing such inspections have no ability to differentiate "hacking tools" from typical laptops and thumb drives (because they are the same thing). So the real goal must simply be intimidation. Of course, given the audience, that tactic is unlikely to have the desired effect.
- m463 2y ago
  The flipper zero is pretty distinctive, but I think the folks who would go to these conferences would leave it at home in a drawer.
  - shagie 2y ago
    Nevada is one where I would avoid having a flipper with me at all. https://www.toool.us/lockpicking-laws.php https://www.toool.us/lockpicking-laws.php > 1. Every person who makes or mends or causes to be made or mended, or has in his possession in the day or nighttime, any engine, machine, tool, false key, picklock, bit, nippers or implement adapted, designed or commonly used for the commission of burglary, invasion of the home, larceny or other crime, under circumstances evincing an intent to use or employ, or allow the same to be used or employed in the commission of a crime, or knowing that the same is intended to be so used, shall be guilty of a gross misdemeanor. Having lock picks in your possession coupled with the circumstances that suggest you intend to use them would be a crime. It wouldn't be a stretch to find someone with a flipper poking at things could run afoul of this law. It is in the "a flipper is legal, but be very cautious having it... and if you were some place where you shouldn't be and had a flipper, it could make things worse."
    - addaon 2y ago
      Having lock picks in your possession coupled with the circumstances that suggest you intend to use them IN THE COMMISSION OF A CRIME would be a crime. Having them with the intent of drumming up sales, or teaching use, is not a crime (based on the wording of the law you supplied).
aaron695 2y ago
This was first talked about at the 2018 Defcon after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, it seems exactly the same - https://www.csoonline.com/article/566069/vegas-hotel-room-checks-raise-privacy-safety-concerns-at-def-con-black-hat.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/566069/vegas-hotel-room-ch... Disney also started a "Room Check" after the shootings - https://touringplans.com/blog/disney-in-a-minute-what-is-a-room-check/ https://touringplans.com/blog/disney-in-a-minute-what-is-a-r... The sooner we have "The Raven Hotel" the better, but until then I'm not totally sure what you can do? Know it will happen and keep guns and laptops in locked bags when you are not there I guess? The man-children of HN are the first to cry when big corporations don't protect them, there's some irony this site is crying about it.
gryfft 2y ago
Another fine upper management execution of the Politician's Syllogism [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism
- bankcust08385 2y ago
  The fallacy employed is even dumber than that: Ban or destroy all nerd magic wands and hacking happening anywhere and everywhere else in the world will stop.
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
1. It is not daily room searches. It’s daily room checks by the cleaning crew even when asked to not disturb. 2. The policy is for the cleaning staff to scrupulously applies the usual policy with more attention than usual and reports out of the ordinary things to a support group with IT and security, which seems, well, fine? They are hosting a large group of people specialising in hacking. It is indeed more likely that something fishy with their IT will happen then than at any other point in time. The whole thing is just pretty much asking staff to be extra vigilant. There are plenty of precedents allowing me to suggest it’s a very reasonable and good idea. The Twitter thread then quickly goes into crazy conspiratorial territory when they somehow think that the pictures shared imply search and seizure. Hotels never seize things and they don’t rummage through your stuff. The whole thing is about security getting involved proactively if they see things in the open especially if they are plugged where they shouldn’t be. Still amusing to see people who spent their whole careers arguing about extra invasive provisions to shield against potential sometime fairly remote security risk extremely spooked by room checking - a fairly standard procedure in every hotel. Edit: Downvoting me to death because you dislike what I say is not going to make it stop being common sense. At least, if you disagree, please have the courage to engage in honest discussion. Also please read the thread, 90% of the reply at the time of my edit are completely pointless because they didn’t bother checking what the hotel is looking for and prefer trying (and predictably failing) to look smug.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  If the worry is IT issues, what’s a room check going to do? Are they going to report people for having laptops? That’s not what these checks are for. These started in response to the mass shooting at Mandalay Bay, and they’re looking for an arsenal.
  - rob74 2y ago
    That... makes more sense, actually. But, if they want to prevent something like that from happening again, they have to take a look at every room in every hotel whenever there is an event going on that could be targeted - which, in Las Vegas, I think is pretty much all the time?
irjustin 2y ago
I wonder what happened in the past to create these policies. Seems like some crazy things. They outright don't trust this group. Property damage?
- yodelshady 2y ago
  There's always the chance of some idiot who thinks they're going to take down society with nmap and metasploit. The hotel's safe, but I'd be worried about some other legitimate customers getting mixed up in it. Though I also really don't want to be the one reviewing reports from housekeeping. "Yes, that's a laptop running hacky stuff, because it's a speaker rehearsing slides. Not a visually identical laptop running visually identical tools against slightly different numbers."
- prepend 2y ago
  I think this was in response to the shooting a few years ago where the shooter put his DND on for days and had his guns and ammo out all over the room. I’ve had “room checks” at many hotels since then and they said it was for security purposes.
- michaelt 2y ago
  What happened in the past was the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting [1] - the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in American history. It was conducted by shooting out of a hotel room window. The shooter had 24 guns and over a thousand rounds of ammunition in the hotel room - which went unnoticed partly because the guest put up the 'do not disturb' sign. The hotel owners have presumably decided that the high-probability-minor-damage risk to their business from a few paranoid types avoiding their hotel is not as great as the very-low-probability-enormous-damage risk from a copycat mass shooting. And so, ignoring the do-not-disturb sign and snooping on guests' rooms is the norm in Vegas these days. And if they happen to have a large block booking of particularly privacy-conscious people and so a noticeable fraction of the rooms are declining maid service, I can understand why they'd want to be ready to carry out some supplemental checks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
  - 2y ago
Metacelsus 2y ago
Wasn't this a thing last year too?
- johncessna 2y ago
  It's been an issue in the past, and the articles mention it.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Yes, they've been doing it for a while.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
spacecadet 2y ago
I stayed at a hotel directly behind the convention center, no room searches...
- intunderflow 2y ago
  Per the image in the linked post daily room searches are mandatory for people staying on property who booked as part of the DEFCON room block
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  Your room was certainly searched (effectively required in all the big strip hotels after the 2017 shooting) but those searches are mostly housekeeping crew phoning in anything particularly "problematic looking" during regular cleaning and a separate set of dedicated staff doing random walk-ins every day or other day (generally without touching anything) where they step in look around for 30 seconds and go to the next room. It's designed to be exactly the thing you never notice while you are there unless you don't leave your room.
  - spacecadet 2y ago
    Interesting! Except I put a game camera in my room facing the door. I couldn't even get fresh towels without calling 4 times. Maybe I was just lucky.
    - DaSHacka 2y ago
      Same here. Been using a little fake phone charger that's actually a hidden camera in Hotels for years now, and didn't see anyone come in. Sure, its possible the maids are secretly 31337 h4xx0rs and noticed the device, pulled it, plugged it into their computers, deleted the video, and replaced it, but I somehow doubt it.
intunderflow 2y ago
More images are included by the same poster at this URL, disclosing what the hotel considers hacking tools: https://x.com/d0rkph0enix/status/1822879409126162779 https://x.com/d0rkph0enix/status/1822879409126162779 Seems like whoever drafted this policy has no idea what they're talking about given USB drives and empty breadboards are on here
- cyberge99 2y ago
  I blame Hollywood, not the hotel staff. They can’t be expected to know what each and every stray circuitboard is/does. Not all circuitboards are bombs, but almost all modern bombs have circuit boards.
  - Hizonner 2y ago
    Anybody who gets their worldview from the movies deserves a big, hearty chunk of any resulting blame.
    - themaninthedark 2y ago
      I remember a thread, either Twitter or Reddit where quotes from the book Lolita was used as evidence that most/all men are scum and perverts....
    - xboxnolifes 2y ago
      More and more I feel that most if not all people get a good portion if their world views from media.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    All bombs contain matter, yet "matter" managed to escape the list. Perhaps there is a flaw in this logic?
  - CyberDildonics 2y ago
    Where are all the "modern bombs" you're talking about?
nabla9 2y ago
DEFCON conference attendees have a history of hacking hotel room keys, property management systems, filling pools with bubbles and doing all kind of mostly harmless but annoying shenanigans in hotels they reside during the conference. The conferences have changed a lot but something always happens. The right policy would be to always respect customer privacy and if they can't be trusted to behave, refuse them.
- alwa 2y ago
  In this case, then, you feel that the right policy would be to deny them accommodation outright rather than accommodating them on the condition that you’ll glance in the room once a day?
multimoon 2y ago
I’m not sure what the hotel is hoping to gain here, and the argument in this thread is very weird. The argument for this in the comments below seems to be justifying this saying that the hotel is doing safety checks because of a prior mass shooting, which was unrelated to DEFCON, or that they’re looking for “suspicious networking equipment” which none of the staff is trained on how to go find let alone even identify. Moral implication of do not disturb aside, this seems very poorly executed and meaningless. If the management of the hotel for some reason is paranoid and doesn’t like these guests, then don’t accept their business.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  The argument is this has been going on for a long time and isn't anything new or surprising. It's even happened at past events and has always been known to the organizers as commonplace. It isn't justifying the behavior, but attempting to put it into context.
- alwa 2y ago
  I noticed that a hotel I stayed at reworded their door signs to say “cleaning not required,” which seemed to me a sensible way to reframe expectations. Legal obligations aside, how would a provider of public accommodation figure out who to refuse the business to? Do they size up guests at checkin to see if they look hacker-ish? Is that more fair than a bumbling effort at deterrence by advertising your existing security policy, of casting eyes in every room every day—a policy you apply uniformly to every member of the public who wants to rent a room?
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    My understanding from some other conversation was that these rooms were sold as a discounted block to the conference; they knew it was going to be defcon people.
  - kelnos 2y ago
devinegan 2y ago
Vegas local here, after Oct 2017 no Vegas hotel room on the strip is going 24 hours without hotel staff seeing the inside of a room - every hotel has this policy. I don’t know why people expect privacy in Vegas, there are more cameras and technology watching you here than anywhere else in the US.
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  > I don’t know why people expect privacy in Vegas I expect privacy in any home where I live, whether it's for a decade or for a day. When the door closes, it's "my personal space" for the duration I paid for. Of course, now Vegas begs to differ.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    Then you must not rent your home. I've lived in rented apartments my entire adult life and while not daily inspections, everywhere I've lived the management has mandatory inspections every few months to check on fire alarms and other maintenance issues as well as making sure residents aren't violating policy by having more than two pets, trashing the apartment, allowing roaches and other pests to fester, etc. It can be annoying, but if I don't own it, it's not really "my" home.
    - unsupp0rted 2y ago
      Landlords are legally obligated to give 24 hours of notice, if not multiple days of notice, depending on jurisdiction. And they can’t come do inspections day after day.
      - FickleRaptor 2y ago
        These aren’t landlords and notice is typically given as part of the room registration process. That’s not the behavior in question.
quantified 2y ago
Being aboveboard about the evil maid... this can be a new pwning vector for the conference.
- bigiain 2y ago
  I wonder how many attendees social engineered their way into other people's rooms pretending to be room inspection goons? (I wonder if the NSA collected a bunch of zero days by copying every usb drive their undercover operatives found in rooms while "employed" as hotel security?)
  - smegger001 2y ago
    wonder how many devices they lost to devices like usbkill trying to copy other peoples random usb drives at defcon
jedberg 2y ago
Since the festival shooting Vegas hotels have a policy of entering every room every 24 hours. If you skip housekeeping, they get suspicious and then they send security to check on you. Some clever hackers figured out how to use the phone system to make them think housekeeping had been there[0], so now they do inspections when BlackHat/DefCon is in town because they don't trust their own tracking systems. [0] One of the hotels had housekeeping dial *5 on the room phone when they entered the room to clean, and then *5 again when they left. So some hackers would put out their "do not clean" sign and then just dial *5 twice 10 minutes apart so no one would get suspicious.
- Shank 2y ago
  I think your post contradicts itself. It sounds like they "do inspections" every day of the year. > Since the festival shooting Vegas hotels have a policy of entering every room every 24 hours > so now they do inspections when BlackHat/DefCon is in town because they don't trust their own tracking systems What's the difference between these two statements? It sounds to me like the only point is that they have a manual ledger to track inspections, which is probably for the best, given that any would-be domestic terrorist would surely know how to use Google and find this information too.
  - pathartl 2y ago
    I think they mean that cleaning services will passively do inspections, but past cons have marked their rooms as being already cleaned in their system. They do manual inspections during Defcon because they can't rely that cleaning services have gotten to their room.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > What's the difference between these two statements? One describes the policy. Which is what they want to achieve. They want to achieve that a hotel employee checks on every room every 24 hour. The other describes that they don't trust their usual implementation during BlackHat/DefCon. > which is probably for the best, given that any would-be domestic terrorist would surely know how to use Google and find this information too. The whole thing provides probabilistic protection anyway. (Also known as a security theatre, if you want to be uncharitable.) A determined attacker will appear as a model hotel guest up until the point they want to attack. Then they wait until housekeeping is done with their room and move their weapons in the room only after. Hotels are full of people moving luggage around at all hours so this won't be suspicious to anyone. The policy will probably catch some would be attackers (the dumb ones). It will also probably uncover a lot more drug overdoses/suicides/murders/sudden heart attack victims, several days earlier than they would be uncovered otherwise. I bet that for every Stephen Paddock found there is at least a hundred "oops this room has a dead person in it for some reason".
Shank 2y ago
Why does DEF CON have to happen in Vegas? I can understand staying after Caesars Palace abruptly terminated their contract, but in future years, is there any real glue that keeps people there? I mean supposedly this is one of the most paranoid groups of people congregating in one place. Wanting hotel room privacy should be something that should be factored into the venue-search in-general, right? Are there any huge advantages to staying in Vegas? Why not another city, perhaps with negotiated privacy for rooms at choice hotels?
- zebomon 2y ago
  Las Vegas has a uniquely scalable infrastructure for conventions. Lodging, restaurants, meeting spaces, entertainment.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Surely DEFCON has more limited attendance than any number more mainstream conferences. Search results are saying that defcon sees some 30k people. The 2023 Chicago Auto Show had 300k. Major city with all the amenities. https://www.chicagoautoshow.com/the-2023-chicago-auto-show-continues-its-strong-rebound-signaling-a-return-for-auto-shows-1/ https://www.chicagoautoshow.com/the-2023-chicago-auto-show-c...
    - rahimnathwani 2y ago
      Does the Chicago Auto Show host 300k people on a single day?
      - selectodude 2y ago
        Nah, it’s about 30,000 per day for a week a half.
      - monksy 2y ago
        The Mccormick center is also hosting the DNC. (Alongside the United Center) It's very capable to handle large conferences and does throughout the year.
Animats 2y ago
The gun crowd gets upset about this, too.[1] [1] https://www.firearmsnews.com/editorial/2nd-amendment-nightmares-las-vegas-increase/463711#replay https://www.firearmsnews.com/editorial/2nd-amendment-nightma...
gorbachev 2y ago
Since these are apparently being done while people are out of their rooms, according to the article, what do they expect to find? Surely everyone planning on doing something malicious would leave their tools behind... Also why aren't they targeting laptops? That's probably the #1 "hacking tool" in anyone's arsenal. But, hey, I bet this looks great on a Powerpoint presentation to the board of directors.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > what do they expect to find? Hopefully nothing! But there was a 2017 mass shooting so they're looking out for travellers carrying fourteen AR-15 rifles, 1600 rounds of ammunition and 50 pounds of explosives. IDK what the mentions of "hacking tools" are. But if I was running a hotel and I was hosting defcon, I'd give all staff refresher training on "don't plug in that USB stick you found dropped in the parking lot" and suchlike.
  - j-bos 2y ago
    Weird how their was no clear motive for the shooter, has that changed?
  - 15155 2y ago
    > AR-15 rifles, 1600 rounds of ammunition and 50 pounds of explosives. All of which can be fit into a handful of suitcases that staff are not opening to inspect. 1600 rounds of ammunition is not very much.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      Wikipedia tells me "with help from hotel bellmen, he brought five suitcases to his room on September 25, seven on the 26th, two on the 28th, six on the 30th, and two on October 1." I'm sure someone could perform a mass shooting without twenty suitcases. But I can see how it would be embarrassing, from the hotel's point of view, that this guy set up the attack right under the noses of security, with bellhops taking twenty suitcases of guns and ammo up to his hotel room.
FickleRaptor 2y ago
I was walking through resortsworld when a security guard started walking next to us. After about 50 feet, he demanded our ID, informed us we were on private property, and threatened to have us arrested for trespassing, all in the same sentence. The issue was that my colleague was one of the amateur radio VE for the ham radio village and happened to have his handheld with him. The guard was aggressive, entitled, and arrogant. Yesterday, I poked another friend to see where they were at the conference. They were not at the conference. They were stuck at resorts world three hours after the conference had started. Their conference badges had been confiscated by security. The security team had tried to force them to throw them in the garbage, and for a while it appeared that security had thrown them away after they had confiscated them. It’s literally just a fancy gameboy! This isn’t a safety issue, it’s deliberate, malicious abuse by a vendor who knowingly sold a discounted room block to defcon conference attendees and then, through persistent and abusive behavior, tried to force those customers to leave once they checked in. The issue was mentioned early in closing ceremonies as something that will be addressed with the vendor once all conference attendees have been checked out of the hotels. This wasn’t random room check for caches of weapons. It was not a safety search. It was luggage contents searches for the lulz, seemingly intended as harassment. Either they didn’t want us there in the first place, or they wanted the revenue for the rooms forfeited. This was not behavior in good faith and the specific acts that I witnessed personally and others whom I trust communicated to me that they had experienced directly, could only be intended as harassment or profoundly extreme incompetence. For 20 years, I’ve stayed almost exclusively at Hilton properties when I travel, with the exception of Vegas for HSC. I’m almost certain to switch to another company after this, unless they issue a really, really, excellent apology. Quit your BS excuses about how this was a legitimate safety issue. This was almost entirely limited to one hotel. Somehow another 10+ major hotels, including Caesars who non-renewed the conference contract, managed to not do any of this. Edited for spleling.
- mapmeld 2y ago
  From other reports, it sounds like hotel security was trained about hackers carrying the Flipper Zero. Maybe they thought the badges were something like that?
jcrawfordor 2y ago
Room inspections are nothing new in Las Vegas, being the norm at many on-strip properties since 2017. In that way, the article perhaps misses the point. What was new this year were many reports of aggressive, confrontational behavior by security at Resorts World specifically. In particular, there are quite a few stories of Resorts World security staff actively escalating confrontations and of calling over armed colleagues over resistance as minor as asking to see ID. This kind of thing is extremely worrying from a licensed security force with armed members, and suggests a serious defect in the training and security leadership at Resorts World. The problem was not room checks per se, it was the incompetence the people doing the checks repeatedly demonstrated. I think the press may have been reticent to level accusations at specific resort operators, but I hope journalists will put some pressure on Resorts World. Do they normally mount this type of response to high-risk events? Who planned their handling of DEFCON? Are their security staff trained in deescalation? What is their policy on when and how trespass threats should be issued? The overall feeling was that the Resorts World security department was exceptionally unprofessional and, through their confrontational behavior, made this into far more of a scandal than it should ever have been. Caesars security, by contrast, is downright militarized, but seems to have been far better trained and more graceful in their handling of similar situations.
atlgator 2y ago
This sounds common for Vegas conventions. The same thing happens every year at Venetian/Palazzo during AWS:Reinvent. They come by 2-3 times during the week. The excuse I got is that they are trying to prevent another Las Vegas shooter situation.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  Ahhhh....2nd and 4th amendments. As an EU people, I get it now...freedom. I guess I've been watching too many 1st Amendment auditors.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    The constitution doesn't apply to things that happen between private individuals. I don't have to allow guns in my hotel, hate speech in my newspaper, or have a warrant to search people as a condition of being on my property. The solution, as always, is to vote with your wallet.
Havoc 2y ago
wtf are they hoping to achieve with inspections for thumb drives? Find one with a convenient label on it that says Evil Plan?
seaourfreed 2y ago
Fight back: 1) Get video of everything 2) Try to get video of their in room search 3) Get names of the security people and upper management 4) Share facts on line 5) The find the legal entity's ownership. Find out who. Publish 6) Put videos online 7) Warn all hotels and conference companies of this vendor. 8) Look for intel links. It may cost them far more in security and lost of future revenue for any revenue they gain this week. This is likely not done for more revenue. Look for other reasons it is being done 9) Publish all. Have fun with it.
486sx33 2y ago
Probably the most fun is almost all on strip hotels have access to lots of Ethernet cables in your room… maybe the VoIP phone, maybe an access panel in the closet. Maybe nothing in my network for windows users but you can start digging into vlan’s pretty quick
glitchc 2y ago
Sounds DefCon has become an unpleasant conference to go to. Other conferences don't merit such scrutiny.
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  They could just meet elsewhere, in a different city. It's not that hard to book a hotel with a speaker podium. Then again, you won't be able to gamble and get prostitutes elsewhere as easily..
kopirgan 2y ago
Remember this cartoon of some bloke standing at airport arrival hall with a placard "Mr.. bin Laden". That was before he was found. He says seems as good idea as any. Guess this too.
hartator 2y ago
Is DEF CON still requiring IDs to attend?
- nickdurfe 2y ago
  Defcon has never required IDs to attend. They were requiring negative Covid tests in 2021, but that is no longer required.
  - DaSHacka 2y ago
    Not true; DEF CON 29 required a valid COVID vaccine card with at least two vaccines listed, paired with an ID (most of us used our passports) to be given a little silver wristband before you got your badge. and that year, the goons were searching for attendees without the silver wristband more closely than even attendees without a badge, they weren't joking around.
canjobear 2y ago
I don’t know much about Def Con but the drama coming out of this conference is really entertaining.
cbanek 2y ago
Here I remember my first DEFCON (6) at the Plaza Hotel. Someone literally started a road flare on some higher floor, then sent the flare down to the casino level in the elevator, filling the floor with smoke. I feel like the attendees these days are much less dangerous, but these searches seem ridiculous and over the top compared to any past year I can remember.
bankcust08385 2y ago
DEF CON should just permanently move to somewhere awesome like Santa Fe NM or San Marcos TX.
- bankcust08385 2y ago
  Errata: Thinking on it, I vote against San Marcos TX because the city police department is unprofessional.
xg15 2y ago
Easy fix: Just co-schedule the hacker convention with a furry con, then the hotel staff will think twice before barging into rooms unannounced...
- jack_riminton 2y ago
  I think the venn diagram of attendees is already overlapping quite a bit, that could be both good and bad
  - xg15 2y ago
    Yeah, I figure 1/3 of the attendees would book both cons anyway.
jack_riminton 2y ago
Is the hotel/franchise aiming to become a target of hackers? because that's the right way to go about it
Brett_Riverboat 2y ago
I was just here a few weeks ago for the pure storage conference and never saw a single security guard (unless they were plain clothes maybe?). The majority of the building was near empty on the convention floor besides the pure storage conference. My experience was very different and its weird for me to think only a few weeks apart they went from practically no security to police state tactics.
midnitewarrior 2y ago
So, they launch a mass Evil Maid attack against DEF CON convention attendees?
vonunov 2y ago
Lol, that statement from Resorts World reeks of ChatGPT. They don't even know why they're doing what they're doing. I'm not sure if they even know what they're trying to do. Someone in management is trying to look like they're getting shit done.

322 points by jarsin 2y ago

why not actually, attend the convention, and learn how to perform security related procedure, rather than alienate the people most apt to help, and educate in the context of computer security. start with learning what hacking is, and talk about "living off the land" using field expedient improvised tools and materials.

petre 2y ago
Sure, educate the mall cops about USB thumb drives.

devwastaken 2y ago

The "inspection" was reportedly carried out in a threatening and illegal manner that held attendees against their will and coerced them to give up private belongings. The DA should prosecute the "security staff" for their illegal acts and make an example out of them. This is not the first time a hotel has done this, and they will continue to act outside the law until those responsible face felonies and prison time.

bigiain 2y ago
> The DA should prosecute the "security staff" for their illegal acts Ha ha. In _Vegas_? Not in this timeline. The DA is _not_ on your side in this fight.
- bankcust08385 2y ago
  That's okay. That's what the Feds are for when there is state-level corruption. (When Spotting the Fed may actually also be useful.)

philwelch 2y ago

https://archive.is/CqCfj https://archive.is/CqCfj

illuminant 2y ago

Well I remember the times I went to (single digit) Def Cons. Cement in the toilet, sizable portions of the hotel lost power, haxors taking the event room doors off their hinges, those plotting to exploit the digital signage. Vegas + hacker cons, everything one might expect.

DaSHacka 2y ago
As a more recent attendee, it's not like that at all anymore. The edgiest you'll get is some graybeard thinking they're "alt" and "punk" while advocating for checking IDs at registration and having quite literally identical political views to Brenda from HR. The attendees have overall been insanely passified, I presume a side-effect of the rapid growth and number of straight-lace SWE guys there because of their employers. Even this year, you will be trespassed from the con for putting up _googly eyes_ and there are 4-6 different villages dedicates to "break-times" and inclusivity. Probably for the best, no way a truly "edgy" and zany hacker con would've been able to find venues to host at nowadays anyway.
- no_time 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - therealdkz 2y ago
    [flagged]
- zer8k 2y ago
  > Probably for the best, no way a truly "edgy" and zany hacker con would've been able to find venues to host at nowadays anyway. Best for business, perhaps. I stopped going several years ago when the conference got too soft. Yes, the antics were sometimes too much and it's understandable why SOME THINGS would need to be reigned in. For example, concrete in the toilets, flares in the elevators, windows getting broken, ATMs being hacked etc. 100% understandable. The defcon today is completely sterilized. It's an extension of corporate culture in it's truest sense. There's no interesting things going on anymore. The noted "inclusivity" breakouts and villages are growing, the goons are more serious, the "hackers" are mostly Joe's From Accounting, etc. Part of the allure of old defcon was everyone was just a hacker. It never, ever mattered who you identified as or what you were. Can you hack? Great, you're in. Everyone serious never gave names and cameras were very seriously frowned upon. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. If I'm being honest it's gone from the high point of my year to something I'm glad is just a memory for me. I went for ~15 years. It's sad to watch it turn into this sterilized "dont offend anyone or anything" after being counter-culture for decades. But, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I'm once again glad I didn't spend the money to go.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago

Undoubtedly some ‘security’ higher up trying to build their little fiefdom and expand their corporate influence. The absolute hilarity of the mere concept of this does distract me a bit from how invasive it is. Like, what do you think that you’re looking for? What’s cause for suspicion? They’re almost certainly just looking for large quantities of ‘computer stuff’ in a single room. Aside from like, large antennas, I really can’t imagine what correctly ‘looks’ sketchy.

xyzzy123 2y ago
What is the problem with having lots of computers in a room anyway?
- jen20 2y ago
  God help them during Re:Invent.

animitronix 2y ago

[flagged]

reaperducer 2y ago
Lol I wish I'd been there just so I could sue the ever-loving shit out of everyone. They literally would have had to arrest me. It's Vegas. The laws are different than in other places, especially in hotels that have casinos, and especially along the Strip, which is Clark County, not Las Vegas. The casinos have 80 years of experience dealing with disruptive people. Think mobsters, terrorists, foreign governments, and the occasional tiger roaming the hallways.
mrandish 2y ago
> I wish I'd been there just so I could sue the ever-loving shit out of everyone. Perhaps you are unaware that most of the hotel contracts you've ever agreed to have provisions whereby you have already agreed the hotel has the right to conduct inspections of the room you're renting upon giving you advance notice. So you'd have no grounds to sue anyone. Before assuming a reflexive posture of belligerent bluster, and threatening to "sue the ever-loving shit out of everyone" it's advisable to pause and inform yourself whether you're about to be completely in the wrong. > They literally would have had to arrest me. I suspect if you pointlessly wasted their time with ridiculous threats and were annoying to boot, they'd be more than happy to arrange that.
- hansvm 2y ago
  > Perhaps you are unaware that most of the hotel contracts you've ever agreed to have provisions whereby you have already agreed the hotel has the right to conduct inspections of the room you're renting upon giving you advance notice. You've been at hotels with that sort of contract in place? Where? The only things I've ever had to sign before taking possession of the room are a pet policy and something affirming they're actually allowed to use the card on file to pay for damages. Those documents are short and to-the-point, and I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think a "no dogs on the bed" clause is likely to grant random detentions and inspections.

firesteelrain 2y ago

The Venetian conference rooms and suites were used to ‘hack’ a satellite last year during Hack a Sat Finals. There were no issues. It is right next to the Caesars Convention Center. I know this is a new venue so maybe they are a little trigger happy

mrandish 2y ago

They have to know the glorified mall cops doing such inspections have no ability to differentiate "hacking tools" from typical laptops and thumb drives (because they are the same thing). So the real goal must simply be intimidation. Of course, given the audience, that tactic is unlikely to have the desired effect.

m463 2y ago
The flipper zero is pretty distinctive, but I think the folks who would go to these conferences would leave it at home in a drawer.
- shagie 2y ago
  Nevada is one where I would avoid having a flipper with me at all. https://www.toool.us/lockpicking-laws.php https://www.toool.us/lockpicking-laws.php > 1. Every person who makes or mends or causes to be made or mended, or has in his possession in the day or nighttime, any engine, machine, tool, false key, picklock, bit, nippers or implement adapted, designed or commonly used for the commission of burglary, invasion of the home, larceny or other crime, under circumstances evincing an intent to use or employ, or allow the same to be used or employed in the commission of a crime, or knowing that the same is intended to be so used, shall be guilty of a gross misdemeanor. Having lock picks in your possession coupled with the circumstances that suggest you intend to use them would be a crime. It wouldn't be a stretch to find someone with a flipper poking at things could run afoul of this law. It is in the "a flipper is legal, but be very cautious having it... and if you were some place where you shouldn't be and had a flipper, it could make things worse."
  - addaon 2y ago
    Having lock picks in your possession coupled with the circumstances that suggest you intend to use them IN THE COMMISSION OF A CRIME would be a crime. Having them with the intent of drumming up sales, or teaching use, is not a crime (based on the wording of the law you supplied).

aaron695 2y ago

This was first talked about at the 2018 Defcon after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, it seems exactly the same - https://www.csoonline.com/article/566069/vegas-hotel-room-checks-raise-privacy-safety-concerns-at-def-con-black-hat.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/566069/vegas-hotel-room-ch... Disney also started a "Room Check" after the shootings - https://touringplans.com/blog/disney-in-a-minute-what-is-a-room-check/ https://touringplans.com/blog/disney-in-a-minute-what-is-a-r... The sooner we have "The Raven Hotel" the better, but until then I'm not totally sure what you can do? Know it will happen and keep guns and laptops in locked bags when you are not there I guess? The man-children of HN are the first to cry when big corporations don't protect them, there's some irony this site is crying about it.

gryfft 2y ago

Another fine upper management execution of the Politician's Syllogism [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism

bankcust08385 2y ago
The fallacy employed is even dumber than that: Ban or destroy all nerd magic wands and hacking happening anywhere and everywhere else in the world will stop.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

1. It is not daily room searches. It’s daily room checks by the cleaning crew even when asked to not disturb. 2. The policy is for the cleaning staff to scrupulously applies the usual policy with more attention than usual and reports out of the ordinary things to a support group with IT and security, which seems, well, fine? They are hosting a large group of people specialising in hacking. It is indeed more likely that something fishy with their IT will happen then than at any other point in time. The whole thing is just pretty much asking staff to be extra vigilant. There are plenty of precedents allowing me to suggest it’s a very reasonable and good idea. The Twitter thread then quickly goes into crazy conspiratorial territory when they somehow think that the pictures shared imply search and seizure. Hotels never seize things and they don’t rummage through your stuff. The whole thing is about security getting involved proactively if they see things in the open especially if they are plugged where they shouldn’t be. Still amusing to see people who spent their whole careers arguing about extra invasive provisions to shield against potential sometime fairly remote security risk extremely spooked by room checking - a fairly standard procedure in every hotel. Edit: Downvoting me to death because you dislike what I say is not going to make it stop being common sense. At least, if you disagree, please have the courage to engage in honest discussion. Also please read the thread, 90% of the reply at the time of my edit are completely pointless because they didn’t bother checking what the hotel is looking for and prefer trying (and predictably failing) to look smug.

mattmaroon 2y ago
If the worry is IT issues, what’s a room check going to do? Are they going to report people for having laptops? That’s not what these checks are for. These started in response to the mass shooting at Mandalay Bay, and they’re looking for an arsenal.
- rob74 2y ago
  That... makes more sense, actually. But, if they want to prevent something like that from happening again, they have to take a look at every room in every hotel whenever there is an event going on that could be targeted - which, in Las Vegas, I think is pretty much all the time?

irjustin 2y ago

I wonder what happened in the past to create these policies. Seems like some crazy things. They outright don't trust this group. Property damage?

yodelshady 2y ago
There's always the chance of some idiot who thinks they're going to take down society with nmap and metasploit. The hotel's safe, but I'd be worried about some other legitimate customers getting mixed up in it. Though I also really don't want to be the one reviewing reports from housekeeping. "Yes, that's a laptop running hacky stuff, because it's a speaker rehearsing slides. Not a visually identical laptop running visually identical tools against slightly different numbers."
prepend 2y ago
I think this was in response to the shooting a few years ago where the shooter put his DND on for days and had his guns and ammo out all over the room. I’ve had “room checks” at many hotels since then and they said it was for security purposes.
michaelt 2y ago
What happened in the past was the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting [1] - the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in American history. It was conducted by shooting out of a hotel room window. The shooter had 24 guns and over a thousand rounds of ammunition in the hotel room - which went unnoticed partly because the guest put up the 'do not disturb' sign. The hotel owners have presumably decided that the high-probability-minor-damage risk to their business from a few paranoid types avoiding their hotel is not as great as the very-low-probability-enormous-damage risk from a copycat mass shooting. And so, ignoring the do-not-disturb sign and snooping on guests' rooms is the norm in Vegas these days. And if they happen to have a large block booking of particularly privacy-conscious people and so a noticeable fraction of the rooms are declining maid service, I can understand why they'd want to be ready to carry out some supplemental checks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
- 2y ago

Metacelsus 2y ago

Wasn't this a thing last year too?

johncessna 2y ago
It's been an issue in the past, and the articles mention it.
saagarjha 2y ago
Yes, they've been doing it for a while.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

spacecadet 2y ago

I stayed at a hotel directly behind the convention center, no room searches...

intunderflow 2y ago
Per the image in the linked post daily room searches are mandatory for people staying on property who booked as part of the DEFCON room block
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
Your room was certainly searched (effectively required in all the big strip hotels after the 2017 shooting) but those searches are mostly housekeeping crew phoning in anything particularly "problematic looking" during regular cleaning and a separate set of dedicated staff doing random walk-ins every day or other day (generally without touching anything) where they step in look around for 30 seconds and go to the next room. It's designed to be exactly the thing you never notice while you are there unless you don't leave your room.
- spacecadet 2y ago
  Interesting! Except I put a game camera in my room facing the door. I couldn't even get fresh towels without calling 4 times. Maybe I was just lucky.
  - DaSHacka 2y ago
    Same here. Been using a little fake phone charger that's actually a hidden camera in Hotels for years now, and didn't see anyone come in. Sure, its possible the maids are secretly 31337 h4xx0rs and noticed the device, pulled it, plugged it into their computers, deleted the video, and replaced it, but I somehow doubt it.

intunderflow 2y ago

More images are included by the same poster at this URL, disclosing what the hotel considers hacking tools: https://x.com/d0rkph0enix/status/1822879409126162779 https://x.com/d0rkph0enix/status/1822879409126162779 Seems like whoever drafted this policy has no idea what they're talking about given USB drives and empty breadboards are on here

cyberge99 2y ago
I blame Hollywood, not the hotel staff. They can’t be expected to know what each and every stray circuitboard is/does. Not all circuitboards are bombs, but almost all modern bombs have circuit boards.
- Hizonner 2y ago
  Anybody who gets their worldview from the movies deserves a big, hearty chunk of any resulting blame.
  - themaninthedark 2y ago
    I remember a thread, either Twitter or Reddit where quotes from the book Lolita was used as evidence that most/all men are scum and perverts....
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    More and more I feel that most if not all people get a good portion if their world views from media.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  All bombs contain matter, yet "matter" managed to escape the list. Perhaps there is a flaw in this logic?
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  Where are all the "modern bombs" you're talking about?

nabla9 2y ago

DEFCON conference attendees have a history of hacking hotel room keys, property management systems, filling pools with bubbles and doing all kind of mostly harmless but annoying shenanigans in hotels they reside during the conference. The conferences have changed a lot but something always happens. The right policy would be to always respect customer privacy and if they can't be trusted to behave, refuse them.

alwa 2y ago
In this case, then, you feel that the right policy would be to deny them accommodation outright rather than accommodating them on the condition that you’ll glance in the room once a day?

multimoon 2y ago

I’m not sure what the hotel is hoping to gain here, and the argument in this thread is very weird. The argument for this in the comments below seems to be justifying this saying that the hotel is doing safety checks because of a prior mass shooting, which was unrelated to DEFCON, or that they’re looking for “suspicious networking equipment” which none of the staff is trained on how to go find let alone even identify. Moral implication of do not disturb aside, this seems very poorly executed and meaningless. If the management of the hotel for some reason is paranoid and doesn’t like these guests, then don’t accept their business.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JohnMakin 2y ago
The argument is this has been going on for a long time and isn't anything new or surprising. It's even happened at past events and has always been known to the organizers as commonplace. It isn't justifying the behavior, but attempting to put it into context.
alwa 2y ago
I noticed that a hotel I stayed at reworded their door signs to say “cleaning not required,” which seemed to me a sensible way to reframe expectations. Legal obligations aside, how would a provider of public accommodation figure out who to refuse the business to? Do they size up guests at checkin to see if they look hacker-ish? Is that more fair than a bumbling effort at deterrence by advertising your existing security policy, of casting eyes in every room every day—a policy you apply uniformly to every member of the public who wants to rent a room?
- yencabulator 2y ago
  My understanding from some other conversation was that these rooms were sold as a discounted block to the conference; they knew it was going to be defcon people.
- kelnos 2y ago

devinegan 2y ago

Vegas local here, after Oct 2017 no Vegas hotel room on the strip is going 24 hours without hotel staff seeing the inside of a room - every hotel has this policy. I don’t know why people expect privacy in Vegas, there are more cameras and technology watching you here than anywhere else in the US.

unsupp0rted 2y ago
> I don’t know why people expect privacy in Vegas I expect privacy in any home where I live, whether it's for a decade or for a day. When the door closes, it's "my personal space" for the duration I paid for. Of course, now Vegas begs to differ.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jhbadger 2y ago
  Then you must not rent your home. I've lived in rented apartments my entire adult life and while not daily inspections, everywhere I've lived the management has mandatory inspections every few months to check on fire alarms and other maintenance issues as well as making sure residents aren't violating policy by having more than two pets, trashing the apartment, allowing roaches and other pests to fester, etc. It can be annoying, but if I don't own it, it's not really "my" home.
  - unsupp0rted 2y ago
    Landlords are legally obligated to give 24 hours of notice, if not multiple days of notice, depending on jurisdiction. And they can’t come do inspections day after day.
    - FickleRaptor 2y ago
      These aren’t landlords and notice is typically given as part of the room registration process. That’s not the behavior in question.

quantified 2y ago

Being aboveboard about the evil maid... this can be a new pwning vector for the conference.

bigiain 2y ago
I wonder how many attendees social engineered their way into other people's rooms pretending to be room inspection goons? (I wonder if the NSA collected a bunch of zero days by copying every usb drive their undercover operatives found in rooms while "employed" as hotel security?)
- smegger001 2y ago
  wonder how many devices they lost to devices like usbkill trying to copy other peoples random usb drives at defcon

jedberg 2y ago

Since the festival shooting Vegas hotels have a policy of entering every room every 24 hours. If you skip housekeeping, they get suspicious and then they send security to check on you. Some clever hackers figured out how to use the phone system to make them think housekeeping had been there[0], so now they do inspections when BlackHat/DefCon is in town because they don't trust their own tracking systems. [0] One of the hotels had housekeeping dial *5 on the room phone when they entered the room to clean, and then *5 again when they left. So some hackers would put out their "do not clean" sign and then just dial *5 twice 10 minutes apart so no one would get suspicious.

Shank 2y ago
I think your post contradicts itself. It sounds like they "do inspections" every day of the year. > Since the festival shooting Vegas hotels have a policy of entering every room every 24 hours > so now they do inspections when BlackHat/DefCon is in town because they don't trust their own tracking systems What's the difference between these two statements? It sounds to me like the only point is that they have a manual ledger to track inspections, which is probably for the best, given that any would-be domestic terrorist would surely know how to use Google and find this information too.
- pathartl 2y ago
  I think they mean that cleaning services will passively do inspections, but past cons have marked their rooms as being already cleaned in their system. They do manual inspections during Defcon because they can't rely that cleaning services have gotten to their room.
- krisoft 2y ago
  > What's the difference between these two statements? One describes the policy. Which is what they want to achieve. They want to achieve that a hotel employee checks on every room every 24 hour. The other describes that they don't trust their usual implementation during BlackHat/DefCon. > which is probably for the best, given that any would-be domestic terrorist would surely know how to use Google and find this information too. The whole thing provides probabilistic protection anyway. (Also known as a security theatre, if you want to be uncharitable.) A determined attacker will appear as a model hotel guest up until the point they want to attack. Then they wait until housekeeping is done with their room and move their weapons in the room only after. Hotels are full of people moving luggage around at all hours so this won't be suspicious to anyone. The policy will probably catch some would be attackers (the dumb ones). It will also probably uncover a lot more drug overdoses/suicides/murders/sudden heart attack victims, several days earlier than they would be uncovered otherwise. I bet that for every Stephen Paddock found there is at least a hundred "oops this room has a dead person in it for some reason".

Shank 2y ago

Why does DEF CON have to happen in Vegas? I can understand staying after Caesars Palace abruptly terminated their contract, but in future years, is there any real glue that keeps people there? I mean supposedly this is one of the most paranoid groups of people congregating in one place. Wanting hotel room privacy should be something that should be factored into the venue-search in-general, right? Are there any huge advantages to staying in Vegas? Why not another city, perhaps with negotiated privacy for rooms at choice hotels?

zebomon 2y ago
Las Vegas has a uniquely scalable infrastructure for conventions. Lodging, restaurants, meeting spaces, entertainment.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Surely DEFCON has more limited attendance than any number more mainstream conferences. Search results are saying that defcon sees some 30k people. The 2023 Chicago Auto Show had 300k. Major city with all the amenities. https://www.chicagoautoshow.com/the-2023-chicago-auto-show-continues-its-strong-rebound-signaling-a-return-for-auto-shows-1/ https://www.chicagoautoshow.com/the-2023-chicago-auto-show-c...
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    Does the Chicago Auto Show host 300k people on a single day?
    - selectodude 2y ago
      Nah, it’s about 30,000 per day for a week a half.
    - monksy 2y ago
      The Mccormick center is also hosting the DNC. (Alongside the United Center) It's very capable to handle large conferences and does throughout the year.

Animats 2y ago

The gun crowd gets upset about this, too.[1] [1] https://www.firearmsnews.com/editorial/2nd-amendment-nightmares-las-vegas-increase/463711#replay https://www.firearmsnews.com/editorial/2nd-amendment-nightma...

gorbachev 2y ago

Since these are apparently being done while people are out of their rooms, according to the article, what do they expect to find? Surely everyone planning on doing something malicious would leave their tools behind... Also why aren't they targeting laptops? That's probably the #1 "hacking tool" in anyone's arsenal. But, hey, I bet this looks great on a Powerpoint presentation to the board of directors.

michaelt 2y ago
> what do they expect to find? Hopefully nothing! But there was a 2017 mass shooting so they're looking out for travellers carrying fourteen AR-15 rifles, 1600 rounds of ammunition and 50 pounds of explosives. IDK what the mentions of "hacking tools" are. But if I was running a hotel and I was hosting defcon, I'd give all staff refresher training on "don't plug in that USB stick you found dropped in the parking lot" and suchlike.
- j-bos 2y ago
  Weird how their was no clear motive for the shooter, has that changed?
- 15155 2y ago
  > AR-15 rifles, 1600 rounds of ammunition and 50 pounds of explosives. All of which can be fit into a handful of suitcases that staff are not opening to inspect. 1600 rounds of ammunition is not very much.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Wikipedia tells me "with help from hotel bellmen, he brought five suitcases to his room on September 25, seven on the 26th, two on the 28th, six on the 30th, and two on October 1." I'm sure someone could perform a mass shooting without twenty suitcases. But I can see how it would be embarrassing, from the hotel's point of view, that this guy set up the attack right under the noses of security, with bellhops taking twenty suitcases of guns and ammo up to his hotel room.

FickleRaptor 2y ago

I was walking through resortsworld when a security guard started walking next to us. After about 50 feet, he demanded our ID, informed us we were on private property, and threatened to have us arrested for trespassing, all in the same sentence. The issue was that my colleague was one of the amateur radio VE for the ham radio village and happened to have his handheld with him. The guard was aggressive, entitled, and arrogant. Yesterday, I poked another friend to see where they were at the conference. They were not at the conference. They were stuck at resorts world three hours after the conference had started. Their conference badges had been confiscated by security. The security team had tried to force them to throw them in the garbage, and for a while it appeared that security had thrown them away after they had confiscated them. It’s literally just a fancy gameboy! This isn’t a safety issue, it’s deliberate, malicious abuse by a vendor who knowingly sold a discounted room block to defcon conference attendees and then, through persistent and abusive behavior, tried to force those customers to leave once they checked in. The issue was mentioned early in closing ceremonies as something that will be addressed with the vendor once all conference attendees have been checked out of the hotels. This wasn’t random room check for caches of weapons. It was not a safety search. It was luggage contents searches for the lulz, seemingly intended as harassment. Either they didn’t want us there in the first place, or they wanted the revenue for the rooms forfeited. This was not behavior in good faith and the specific acts that I witnessed personally and others whom I trust communicated to me that they had experienced directly, could only be intended as harassment or profoundly extreme incompetence. For 20 years, I’ve stayed almost exclusively at Hilton properties when I travel, with the exception of Vegas for HSC. I’m almost certain to switch to another company after this, unless they issue a really, really, excellent apology. Quit your BS excuses about how this was a legitimate safety issue. This was almost entirely limited to one hotel. Somehow another 10+ major hotels, including Caesars who non-renewed the conference contract, managed to not do any of this. Edited for spleling.

mapmeld 2y ago
From other reports, it sounds like hotel security was trained about hackers carrying the Flipper Zero. Maybe they thought the badges were something like that?

jcrawfordor 2y ago

Room inspections are nothing new in Las Vegas, being the norm at many on-strip properties since 2017. In that way, the article perhaps misses the point. What was new this year were many reports of aggressive, confrontational behavior by security at Resorts World specifically. In particular, there are quite a few stories of Resorts World security staff actively escalating confrontations and of calling over armed colleagues over resistance as minor as asking to see ID. This kind of thing is extremely worrying from a licensed security force with armed members, and suggests a serious defect in the training and security leadership at Resorts World. The problem was not room checks per se, it was the incompetence the people doing the checks repeatedly demonstrated. I think the press may have been reticent to level accusations at specific resort operators, but I hope journalists will put some pressure on Resorts World. Do they normally mount this type of response to high-risk events? Who planned their handling of DEFCON? Are their security staff trained in deescalation? What is their policy on when and how trespass threats should be issued? The overall feeling was that the Resorts World security department was exceptionally unprofessional and, through their confrontational behavior, made this into far more of a scandal than it should ever have been. Caesars security, by contrast, is downright militarized, but seems to have been far better trained and more graceful in their handling of similar situations.

atlgator 2y ago

This sounds common for Vegas conventions. The same thing happens every year at Venetian/Palazzo during AWS:Reinvent. They come by 2-3 times during the week. The excuse I got is that they are trying to prevent another Las Vegas shooter situation.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
Ahhhh....2nd and 4th amendments. As an EU people, I get it now...freedom. I guess I've been watching too many 1st Amendment auditors.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The constitution doesn't apply to things that happen between private individuals. I don't have to allow guns in my hotel, hate speech in my newspaper, or have a warrant to search people as a condition of being on my property. The solution, as always, is to vote with your wallet.

Havoc 2y ago

wtf are they hoping to achieve with inspections for thumb drives? Find one with a convenient label on it that says Evil Plan?

seaourfreed 2y ago

Fight back: 1) Get video of everything 2) Try to get video of their in room search 3) Get names of the security people and upper management 4) Share facts on line 5) The find the legal entity's ownership. Find out who. Publish 6) Put videos online 7) Warn all hotels and conference companies of this vendor. 8) Look for intel links. It may cost them far more in security and lost of future revenue for any revenue they gain this week. This is likely not done for more revenue. Look for other reasons it is being done 9) Publish all. Have fun with it.

486sx33 2y ago

Probably the most fun is almost all on strip hotels have access to lots of Ethernet cables in your room… maybe the VoIP phone, maybe an access panel in the closet. Maybe nothing in my network for windows users but you can start digging into vlan’s pretty quick

glitchc 2y ago

Sounds DefCon has become an unpleasant conference to go to. Other conferences don't merit such scrutiny.

knallfrosch 2y ago
They could just meet elsewhere, in a different city. It's not that hard to book a hotel with a speaker podium. Then again, you won't be able to gamble and get prostitutes elsewhere as easily..

kopirgan 2y ago

Remember this cartoon of some bloke standing at airport arrival hall with a placard "Mr.. bin Laden". That was before he was found. He says seems as good idea as any. Guess this too.

hartator 2y ago

Is DEF CON still requiring IDs to attend?

nickdurfe 2y ago
Defcon has never required IDs to attend. They were requiring negative Covid tests in 2021, but that is no longer required.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  Not true; DEF CON 29 required a valid COVID vaccine card with at least two vaccines listed, paired with an ID (most of us used our passports) to be given a little silver wristband before you got your badge. and that year, the goons were searching for attendees without the silver wristband more closely than even attendees without a badge, they weren't joking around.

canjobear 2y ago

I don’t know much about Def Con but the drama coming out of this conference is really entertaining.

cbanek 2y ago

Here I remember my first DEFCON (6) at the Plaza Hotel. Someone literally started a road flare on some higher floor, then sent the flare down to the casino level in the elevator, filling the floor with smoke. I feel like the attendees these days are much less dangerous, but these searches seem ridiculous and over the top compared to any past year I can remember.

bankcust08385 2y ago

DEF CON should just permanently move to somewhere awesome like Santa Fe NM or San Marcos TX.

bankcust08385 2y ago
Errata: Thinking on it, I vote against San Marcos TX because the city police department is unprofessional.

xg15 2y ago

Easy fix: Just co-schedule the hacker convention with a furry con, then the hotel staff will think twice before barging into rooms unannounced...

jack_riminton 2y ago
I think the venn diagram of attendees is already overlapping quite a bit, that could be both good and bad
- xg15 2y ago
  Yeah, I figure 1/3 of the attendees would book both cons anyway.

jack_riminton 2y ago

Is the hotel/franchise aiming to become a target of hackers? because that's the right way to go about it

Brett_Riverboat 2y ago

I was just here a few weeks ago for the pure storage conference and never saw a single security guard (unless they were plain clothes maybe?). The majority of the building was near empty on the convention floor besides the pure storage conference. My experience was very different and its weird for me to think only a few weeks apart they went from practically no security to police state tactics.

midnitewarrior 2y ago

So, they launch a mass Evil Maid attack against DEF CON convention attendees?

vonunov 2y ago

Lol, that statement from Resorts World reeks of ChatGPT. They don't even know why they're doing what they're doing. I'm not sure if they even know what they're trying to do. Someone in management is trying to look like they're getting shit done.