The Paris OLYMPICS is gearing up to fight an unprecedented level of cyberattack, powered for the first time by artificial intelligence.
Such threat seals could come from criminal groups, countries looking to undermine the Olympics, “hacktivists” with ideological ambitions, gamblers, or even athletes.
“There are so many moving factors that the spectrum of attacks is very broad and this is a very serious security challenge,” John Hultquist, an analyst at Mandiant Consulting, a cyber security consultancy owned by Google, told AFP.
“We worry about everything from broadcasters to sponsors, transport infrastructure, logistics and support, competition.
“Every kind of disruption is a possibility.”
Japanese telecommunications company NTT, which provided IT security for the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021, reported 450 million individual cyberattacks during the last edition of the Games, twice as many as during the 2012 London Games.
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Fending off such attacks is essentially the responsibility of the French Information Systems Security Agency (Anssi) and the Ministry of the Interior, with support from the Defense Ministry’s cyber defense arm (Comcyber).
Vincent Strubel, director general of Anssi, told AFP in March that his attitude to the threat was “neither indifference, nor panic”.
“We have prepared hard. And we still have a few months left to perfect it,” he added.
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Worst case scenario
“The worst-case scenario is that we drown in less serious attacks, and that we don’t see more dangerous attacks coming, targeting critical infrastructure,” he added.
Cyber attacks are nothing new.
A risk management expert recalled in the research magazine Herodote the first cyberattack on an Olympics, in Montreal in 1976, in the Stone Age of computing.
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The Olympics were hit by a 48-hour power outage to the information system. Some events have had to be postponed or moved.
International tensions increase risks. Russia, whose relations with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are strained and whose athletes will not be able to compete under their national flag, has been suspected of several sports-related attacks.
The IOC complained about Russia’s disinformation campaign in November and March.
In 2019, Microsoft said Russian hacking group Fancy Bears tried to attack the computer systems of several global anti-doping agencies.
Russia’s military intelligence service was blamed by the US for releasing the so-called “Olympic Destroyer” malware just before the opening ceremony of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, from which Russian athletes were banned.
In early April, the Kremlin condemned President Emmanuel Macron’s “baseless accusations” that Moscow was spreading information implying that Paris would not be ready for the Olympics.
“The goal is geopolitical, namely to shake trust and confidence in a target and their ability to operate effectively,” Hultquist said.
The Olympics will also operate, for the first time, in an era of democratic and powerful artificial intelligence.
“AI will have a huge impact on us,” said a senior French military official.
That will allow us to “randomize data more quickly, and extract key events that will help us to attack our opponents.” But they “have the same assets and, more importantly, I will have many more opponents.”
“Resources are not commensurate with the challenge of all the attacks we could experience,” he said.
Attacks could target not only venues’ operations, but also local rail and metro systems, Paris’ electricity and water systems, telephone networks, and media covering the Olympics.
“The highest risk is infrastructure and broadcast disruption,” Hultquist said. “You can really influence the games themselves or the world’s ability to see the Olympics.
“If no one can see it, it’s as good as dropping it.”
Attacks could also occur outside the Olympics with the spread of fake videos of the action.
We are entering “a new era where it will be easier to influence the integrity of sports thanks to AI”, said Betsy Cooper, a cyber security expert for the Aspen Institute in the United States.
“Deep-fake videos can be used to distract from the reality of certain events.”
Paper proposal
He also warned results could be changed in those places: “Interference in finish line cameras, falsifying the Hawk-Eye referee system, erasing time, tampering with the scoreboard. The means of interference are varied.”
He pushed “mem compartmentalize your data”.
“Make sure if someone logs into one system, he doesn’t log into all systems.
“You don’t want athletes connected to the same network as the scoring system.”
He recommends an old-fashioned solution.
“You need a paper backup, you need the judges to write down the scores on a piece of paper somewhere that doesn’t touch the system,” he said.
“There are new threat vectors this year that were not present in Tokyo and previous Olympics.” (AFP/Z-3)
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