It likely started with a phone call.
We’ll never know all of the details of the cyberattack that brought MGM Resorts International down for over a week. The details that are publicly available, however, are convincing enough to explain the size and scope of the outage: A hacker called its help desk and asked for multifactor authentication to be turned off on a highly privileged account. That, in turn, made it possible for the hackers to log into that account, either with a previously compromised password or with a password they successfully reset, without alerting the user of that account.
