Gulliver

Business travel

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DIPLOMATS and businessmen visiting the old East Germany used to operate on the (frequently justified) assumption that the Stasi, that country's notoriously nosy secret police, was bugging their hotel rooms with microphones hidden in the headboard or tiny cameras concealed in paintings on the walls.

These days, it seems, things are more sophisticated. On November 10th Kaspersky Labs, a Russian computer security firm, alerted the world to the activities of a group it has dubbed DarkHotel, which has been hijacking hotel Wi-Fi connections since 2007 to allow it to spy on carefully chosen, deliberately targeted guests. Wired has a good write-up of the attack:

The attack is technically slick, and therefore probably the work of a nation-state. Nobody knows which, at least for now, but there are some grounds for juicy speculation. The hackers' targets, for instance, are mostly people from India, Japan and North Korea, all countries that either have nuclear weapons already or could easily build them. Most of the infected hotels are in Asia, though a few are in America. All that, combined with clues in the disassembled malware, has led some people to finger the South Korean government. 

If that is true, there might be some red faces in Seoul. Other victims of the malware seem to include senior bosses from American weapons firms (America is South Korea's chief ally in the region) as well as foreign executives from big companies in "all sectors having to do with economic development and investments". 

Kaspersky reckons that, since its exposé, the hackers have been hurriedly switching everything off and doing their best to disappear. Whether they will stay disappeared—and whether there might be other countries running similar attacks—is anyone's guess. The easiest way to get around the problem is probably to eschew hotel Wi-Fi altogether, buy yourself a mobile-data dongle (ideally with cash) and sit by the window when you need access to the internet. Although the truly paranoid might want to remember that there is no guarantee that mobile phone networks are from determined hackers either. 

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