If Sheldon Adelson hasn’t come to regret his ‘nuke Iran‘ rant he may soon do so. While Las Vegas Sands struggles to make its Web sites fully functional again, Adelson’s cyber-tormentors are 
taking a victory lap. A “Zhao Anderson” posted an 11-minute video to YouTube, emblazoned with taunts and showing proprietary company data of the most sensitive nature. Also, Sands officials are having to admit that the damage was worse than customers and media were initially led to believe. “We have now determined that the hackers reached at least some of the company’s internal drives in the U.S. containing some office productivity information made up largely of documents and spreadsheets,” conceded spokesman Ron Reese. “We … are continuing to investigate what, if any, customer or additional employee data may have been compromised as part of the hacking.” In other words, Sands doesn’t know how bad the damage is. If Adelson isn’t chilled by that, he ought to be.
Reese says “said the company did not know about the additional incursions” into employee data and a map of the company’s internal networks “until it started investigating the video,” according to The Associated Press. “We have now determined that the hackers reached at least some of the company’s internal drives in the U.S. containing some office productivity information made up largely of documents and spreadsheets,” Reese said. Considering that the Feb. 11 cyber attack wasn’t an isolated incident and the hackers are always two steps ahead of Sands, the latter should brace itself for yet more digital defacement.
If that weren’t enough bad news for Adelson, a new poll shows 57% of Americans opposed to a federal ban on Internet gambling. The survey sampled 1,000 voters and was weighted toward the three states — Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware — where Internet gambling is legal. Surprisingly, even more Republicans (74%) than Democrats (70%) supported leaving the issue to the states. (Surprising, I guess, in that the GOP has become synonymous with Sheldon G. Adelson.)
With language like “trample on the rights,” I am suspicious of this poll, as much as I am by a push poll that Adelson was waving around not long ago. Opposition to online gambling was “strong” among 22% of respondents. The poll was bought by the Coalition for Consumer & Online Protections, which is basically a subset of the American Gaming Association, minus Las Vegas Sands.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is hiding behind the Legislature where the question of expanded gambling is concerned (despite strong support among south Floridians). That’s not going to help, especially when anti-gambling activists like John Sowinski are making theatrical bookings for their cine-polemic, Pushing Luck. “We’re ramping up … to stop these gambling interests in their tracks that want to bring gambling to Florida,” said Sowinski, as though the state wasn’t already thick with casinos and parimutuels.
