The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will take place on July 26 and athletes from more than two hundred countries will participate. Russian athletes will be among the 10,000 participants in the events, but the war in Ukraine prevents them from officially representing Russia. Cybersecurity experts, however, expect Russia to likely be one of the biggest winners in the unofficial Olympic hacking game.
Threat intelligence experts from Google subsidiary Mandiant analyzed the threat landscape of the Summer Olympics and concluded, with the utmost confidence, that Russian threat teams pose the top cybersecurity threat. The country’s currency and military for Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February 2022. “
Mandiant does not believe Russia could pose a significant risk to the security of the Olympics. Tim West, director of risk intelligence at WithSecure, formerly F-Secure Business, believes that the Paris Olympics “will face an increased risk of malicious attacks. “”Hacktivists aligned with pro-Russian states will almost in fact try to disrupt the Olympics in some way,” West said.
In his Cyber Threats To Paris 2024 report, West warns that Russia has the ability and goal to undermine the Olympics. “Russia is perfectly capable of deploying human operations alongside cyberattacks,” West said, “and it’s capable of all kinds of attacks. “of networks, adding operational technology. “
Such attacks are unlikely to occur unless there is some point of denial, he added. “The Russian state almost in fact has the ability to influence and direct hacktivist collectives, while directing them as a thin, false canopy for its own operations. This is an obfuscation strategy implemented by hackers sponsored by the Russian state.
A recently published risk study report by FortiGuard Labs, which analyzes discussions on the dark web, mainly points to “an increase in hacktivist activity by pro-Russian teams, such as LulzSec, noname057(16), Cyber Army Russia Reborn, Cyber Dragon and Dragonforce – who in particular denounce it. FortiGuard scholars said they expect hacktivist teams to target infrastructure, media channels and affiliated organizations to “disrupt the development of events, undermine credibility and magnify their messages on the global stage. “
Stephen Kowski, head of lead generation at SlashNext Email Security+, told Infosecurity magazine that, in the worst case, such attacks could simply “cause genuine violence or particularly disrupt the Olympic Games and democratic processes in France. “
The Olympics are “an exclusive confluence of government executives, big business executives, celebrities and ultra-high net worth billionaires,” warned former FBI special agent Jason Hogg, a cyber threat research expert and managing partner of the Matunuck Group. . a verbal exchange via email about security at upcoming games. Not surprisingly, this constitutes a treasure trove of government and advertising espionage that Hogg believes could have lasting political and economic implications in the future.
In fact, the Olympics are indeed an Olympic-sized challenge for cybersecurity experts. The good news is that they’ve been instructed just as hard as the athletes who compete to make sure mitigating defenses are in place.
“A dream team made up of the public and organizations worked in collaboration with the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems, the French National Cybersecurity Agency, the International Olympic Committee and the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee,” said Hogg, “to identify improved cybersecurity infrastructure. ” .
These mitigations come with a segmented network architecture, incident reaction plans to ensure an immediate reaction to any attack through repeated scenarios, and a well-established risk intelligence sharing program. User awareness and education also have a role to play, and the Olympics have an online data hub for people involved in cybersecurity around gaming.
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