On October 10th, 2011, BBC reported on how Olympic officials are performing simulated cyber attacks on the computer systems running London's 2012 Olympic Games. The simulations seek to model a series of worst-case scenarios and include a massive denial of service attack on the official website and a virus getting onto organizer's computers. Olympics officials use the computer networks to record scores and feed information to the public and media.
Officials' concerns over cyberattacks are not misplaced; China was subjected to about 12 million cyberattacks per day during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Furthermore, the cyber threat has evolved from the time of the last Olympics. Hacking groups like Anonymous and LulzSec have hit both private and government organizations, and the Stuxnet worm highlighted the sophistication of politically motivated hackers.
According to Gerry Pennel, chief information officer for London 2012, officials have learned from the 2008 Olympics and plan to use a distributed approach to websites so as to minimize the DDOS attack route. Furthermore, officials will keep all mission-critical game systems isolated from the web, thereby making it hard for an external attack to succeed.
The source article can be found here.
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