There’s been a comment war boiling as Marriott, Will, and the hotel’s internet access company (GTS) duke it out to discern the vulnerability redirecting Marirott internet using guests to a casino scam site.

A commenter identifying himself as the Marriott hotel manager, Tom, said they shut down the server and are resolving the issue.

GTS seems convinced that Will has a rootkit, a malicious program that conceals its processes from the operating system, installed on both his PC and his mom’s MacBook. As proof, they offered up a broken link to a Windows troubleshooting forum where a user experienced the same issue. However, at the end it turned out he had no rootkits. So we’re not sure what that’s for.

Now, correct us if we’re wrong, but if there was a successful rootkit virus installed on a MacBook, that would be like, the front page of Digg with 9999 comments. Even more if it was the world’s first inter-operating system root kit…

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This morning Tom and GTS were on the phone checking out multiple guest rooms with several different laptops to see if they could verify the issue. According to Tom, they were not able to duplicate the problem that Will was experiencing. This could be because GTS has already fixed the problem.

Kudos to Marriott for staying on top of the story, and Will for reporting it. Jeers to GTS for the smokescreen, and for writing us, “Please call me to discuss how we have this “story” removed.”

Keep yours open for a forthcoming post, “How To Win Friends And Influence People With Scarequotes.” — BEN POPKEN & THOMAS MOORE

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