Securing The Paris Olympic Games

Uploaded on 2024-04-29 in NEWS-Cybersecurity News, INTELLIGENCE--International, GOVERNMENT-Law Enforcement, FREE TO VIEW, TECHNOLOGY--Resilience

As the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics is fast approaching and the organisers are becoming increasingly focused on cyber security.

Indeed, French President Emmanuel Macron has said that Russia was trying to undermine the Paris Games through a disinformation campaign.

Its not just fake news and disinformation, large scale international events offer a vast attack surface providing an attractive very enticing opportunities for cyber criminals. There is growing concern about the damaging potential of cyber attacks to disrupt the Olympics this year.

Cyber criminals, hacktivists and state actors of all kinds will be heavily tempted to spoil the party. The Olympic Games’ IT system itself will be targeted, including ticketing, press rooms and stadium access systems. TV broadcasts as well as the power supply to physical venues are also at risk.

The Tokyo Games in 2021 suffered and estimated 450 million cyber attacks and the organising committee for the Paris 2024 Olympics expects to receive eight times as many, around 3.5 billion. At the March InCyber Forum that recently took place in Lille, Vincent Strubel, the director general of the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) said that this year's Summer Games being held in Paris would be a cyber target, especially for foreign states keen on “disrupting the opening ceremony or causing problems in public transportation”.

While Strubel expressed confidence that France was prepared fo attacks by cyber criminals, that means it is essential to anticipate a range of cyber security threats during the event.

With the collaboration between the Paris 2024 Organising Committee, the French Ministry of the Interior, and leading cyber security firms, a robust framework has been established to safeguard the event from cyber threats. In comment, Richard Hummel, the threat intelligence lead at Netscout, said "Cyberwar knows no borders, with international events such as the upcoming Paris Summer Games often prime targets for attackers. Whether they are states, criminals, or hacktivists, the potential targets are numerous... DDoS attacks in particular are a significant threat, capable of making online services inaccessible, with repercussions that can be catastrophic from a security perspective, as well as reputationally or even financially."

According to Hummel cyber security preparation for Paris are an an absolute priority, with collaboration between security experts, governmental agencies, private companies, and international organisations being vital to neutralising cyber threats before they materialise.

The goal will be to avoid the incidents that have disrupted previous Olympic Games. For example, the 2018 Winter Olympics when the official website was unavailable for twelve hours following a cyber attack and the Olympic stadium’s Wi-Fi network was cut off. At the 2008 Olympic Games in China ten years earlier, a piece of malicious code called Olympic Destroyer knocked domestic TV screens offline during the spectacular opening ceremony.

Cybel Angel | Inside The Games

Image: IoC

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