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Jon Clay, VP of threat intelligence at Trend Micro, told IT Brew his company is working alongside Olympics partner Decathlon, a sporting goods distributor, to manage the threat surface facing the Paris games, starting on July 26.
“Because they are a formal partner of the Olympics and they’re providing goods to people, they’re going to be targeted by the adversaries who want to try to either disrupt their services…or you have cybercriminals that will target them and their customers to try to obtain personal information or financial information in an effort to garner profit,” Clay said.
Threat level. It’s part of an overarching, massive threat surface presented by the scope of the games, according to ExtraHop senior strategic advisor Sarah Cleveland. While Cleveland and ExtraHop are not working on the games, she recognizes the potential dangers of the upcoming international competition.
“The cyber risk to the Olympics is probably enormous,” Cleveland said. “Just based upon where it is in Europe, and based upon the visibility of the event and the different amounts of countries that are participating.”
A June World Economic Forum report raised the alarm over the dangers of cyber threats to the games, noting that the 2021 games in Tokyo weathered around 450 million attacks. That number is estimated to increase; Vincent Strubel, director general of the French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), told reporters in May that the Olympics “are facing an unprecedented level of threat.”
“We’ve also done an unprecedented amount of preparation work, so I think we’re a step ahead of the attackers,” Strubel added.
Put me in, coach. It’s not just cyberthreats. Tech is neutralizing other dangers as well. As IT Brew reported, security personnel at the games are deploying AI to detect real world, physical threats. Researchers and law enforcement alike will use detection technology and hashtag tracking to monitor dangerous individuals and to track hashtags and other indicators of violence.
Midsized security companies like Trend Micro don’t have the massive resources of ANSSI, but they’re contributing to the overall security picture. “We all want to do our part—anecdotally, our mission is to keep the world safe for exchanging digital information, and it’s not to keep our customers safe, it’s to keep the world safe,” Clay told IT Brew. “So we try to do our part by doing both: working with our customers, but also with the public in general.”