Yea, I'd think something like onboard Internet is something set up once for the ship, and then basically forgotten about as long as the overall revenue is above some "reasonable" threshold given the number of passengers. Ain't no security team sitting there monitoring user registration metrics in real-time looking for fraud. At best, they might pull logs every quarter to look for vulnerabilities like this to close.
I was on a somewhat fancy cruise a short while ago (Celebrity, fwiw) and they had a small live tv production crew that would film around the ship broadcast daily events and stuff on the ship's tv channel. The live shows also had a number of a/v tech crew people so there certainly are some IT folks employed on the ships while it embarks.
That's cool, I love cruises I find them fascinating although I know quite a few people who don't like them - to each their own. I've never taken a Celebrity cruise but I've been on Royal Caribbean and Disney with my family, I know they're massive undertakings and huge profit machines. They employ hundreds of people from chefs to musicians and nautical engineers... It does make you wonder about the IT part of the operation though.
Why would someone in corporate IT responsible for this not ask Claude to write a script that does this on a much more frequent basis? That person might get a nice attaboi for it, but much less likely an actual bonus for it. Although, I can't imagine they are losing too much money on each cruise from this hack unless the next DefCon is on a cruise ship. Then realizing that 0 passengers signed up for WiFi might seem strange
> Why would someone in corporate IT responsible for this not ask Claude to write a script that does this on a much more frequent basis
Because they have nine trillion bugs in their booking system that have been on backlog since 1910.
According to this source [1] (of dubious quality, granted) Royal Caribbean's entire IT department is about 140 people headed by an electrical engineer.
> more reason to have LLMs do their work for them, not less
Nobody argued for or against LLMs. Just that IT isn't a major investment for any cruise line. And that fixing a problem like this isn't even rationally high on a cruise liner's list of priorities.
If the payment portal is bugging out and the engineer tasked to fixing it is off vibe coding on the off chance that a high schooler is using too much internet (versus trying to steal mom and dad's drinks), I'm not sure I'm unsympathetic to the manager's very predictable reaction.
Since the cruise ship is named, there is a good chance someone at the company (even without technical skills) will notice this article and tip off IT this way.
If it’s any of the major cruise lines there almost certainly isn’t anyone in IT paying that much attention.