Olympics Were Safe from Cyber Attacks

[Atreides]

Security experts claim that provisions were in place to prevent cyber terrorism at the London 2012 Olympics, but it wasn’t a major concern, as most of notable events were rudimentary DDoS attempts or financial fraud.

 

BT has run through worst-case scenarios for cyber terrorism during the Olympics, including putting together provisions for the shutting down of largest power networks. Besides, despite the over 200 million malicious incidents reported during the entire event, only 77 tickets required a human response from analysts.

All those events were described as anything that could be flagged as a potential threat – like a single DDoS attempt or defacement. The experts revealed that necessary defenses were created over 7 years of preparation, while the London 2012 site appeared to be the most popular on the planet during the Games.

Over the course of the 2012 Olympic games, "quite a few" DDoS attacks were reported, along with unsophisticated DNS amplifications, coming "from everywhere". Security analysts admitted that they had to deal with quite serious staff, which potentially would have had impact if the right controls hadn’t been in place".

The targets against the American banks, for example, demonstrate that cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated, not just as hacktivism but a lot more concerted. In other words, there’s evidence clearly about criminals becoming more sophisticated in using such types of instruments now for financial gain.

Some of the hacktivist campaigns over the last 18 months involved the core people evangelizing their point of view on why they wanted to carry out their attacks. In the meantime, there were different scenarios, some being very capable, some being there to participate without realizing what they were doing.

BT has distanced itself from culpability if malicious events did run on its own infrastructure. The company pointed out that it had a huge consumer base in the United Kingdom, and there definitely were people buying DSL circuits from it with nefarious purposes. However, the end users were the ones who were the motivated criminals, while BT supplying services to its customers entered that contract in good faith with its subscribers, and it was up to users whether they break the law or not.