Olympic Games and cyber attacks – be on your guard

The Olympic Games are coming to London this summer, and there’s plenty of talk in the British newspapers about the chances that hacktivists, mischief-makers and or even terrorists might try to make a high profile attack against the event’s computer systems.

Clearly, there may be some who might be tempted to launch denial-of-service attacks against Olympic-related websites to gain some notoriety or headline inches, and there may even be identity thieves and malware authors who attempt to hack their way into Olympic servers to steal information or plant malicious code.

And don’t discount the chances of attack. It was reported that the 2008 Beijing Olympics were on the receiving end of 12 million online attacks per day.

Hopefully, the “war games” simulations run by the Olympics’ Technology Operations Centre (TOC) located in London’s Canary Wharf, will have put both systems…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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