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Comment by jasonjayr | Hacker News Reader

I imagine one of the ships officers will be tipped off by the IT team about the unusual number of free-internet activation attached to your booking id, and either give your room a visit to knock it off, or just bill some multiple of the $170 anyway.

It sounds like it should only be used only a few times per booking, and this is going to hit at least 4/hour for multiple hours a day, so it will stick out like a sore thumb in the logs ....

But, a cool hack, nonetheless :)

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> imagine one of the ships officers will be tipped off by the IT team

If it’s any of the major cruise lines there almost certainly isn’t anyone in IT paying that much attention.

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 haven't been on a cruise in a long time, does anyone know if there are on-board IT people? Might be an interesting job if I ever get bored again.

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.

[1] https://rocketreach.co/royal-caribbean-cruises-ltd-it-depart...

That's even more reason to have LLMs do their work for them, not less.

> 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.

Break things, break fast, break more, break the rest of it, keep breaking... What was the catchphrase? Breaking things doesn't help broken systems.

what exactly would this be breaking? it's an analysis of logs, not providing access to services.

> what exactly would this be breaking?

Whatever those nine trillion bugs the developer is supposed to be working on are up to.

they're clearly not fixing those either, so yet again, what's being broken that wasn't already broken?

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.

This is why things stop working. they go viral and then get patched soon after

> If it’s any of the major cruise lines there almost certainly isn’t anyone in IT paying that much attention.

Until everyone is doing it and their revenue stream falls off.

They probably have some paper pasted next to the equipment to look if the blinky lights are doing the thing, and how to power cycle things.

I imagine the ship officers don't even understand how the internet on the ship works, much less detect fraud. Perhaps all they have is a button to restart the system in case someone complains it's not working.

> the unusual number of free-internet activation attached to your booking id, and either give your room a visit to knock it off

Cruise lines want happy customers. They aren’t going to do something to piss you off for $170.

Not sure. They are known to confiscate for example starlink etc.

They want money more. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a $170 fee.

I'd wonder what the costs and risks are of trying to get that $170, assuming it's one or a tiny amount of passengers compared to dozens each sailing who tell their friends. If you get someone who's got nothing better to do than argue on the topic, make you prove that the charge is justified and not just some misconfigured device that "didn't go online because I only use it for reading ebooks, honest", then it could get ugly including legal or press routes.

On a small scale for a cruise liner scaled operation I'd be prepared to say "huh, that's odd" or turn a blind eye to just one.

They likely have a canned solution like the Cisco Meraki or similar setup and are not looking for extra work; whatever they have is seen as in the category of set-and-forget.

If I was going to go on a cruise, I'd probably bring with my linux laptop for capturing WPA handshakes, and then use the 15 minutes to set up jobs for Hashcat to burn through on my gaming PC at home.

There is A LOT of AP's on cruise ships. Odds are a few are crackable.

If I were going on a cruise, I could think of many much better use of my time than cracking APs. This just seems like you're doing cruising wrong if you're so concerned about it that this is where you want to take your experience

Sir, this is Hacker News.

Right, but even HN peeps need a vacay

Well, I don't hack wifi networks as part of my day job.

I'm an older dude, and no longer find talking to strangers all that fun.

I like nature and the outdoors, but that can be admired only from a great distance until you make port. Going fishing off a moving cruise ship will end your vacation rather quickly (aside from not being feasible - you're going too fast for anything which is catchable on light tackle).

I love the swimming pools and such, but my wife can't swim.

There's all kinds of gambling and stuff, but I don't gamble.

I spent much of the cruise wishing for better internet... Or that I'd brought more books.

We spent a good amount of time playing FF7 in the evenings on our hotel TV wired up to a PSP.

clearly, we're all free to do whatever for our precious time off, but you just listed a whole lot of things that you don't like to do yet you paid for it anyways. again, we all like different things, but i'd prefer to spend money doing things I enjoy, but you do you

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