now this summer Paris is to host the
Olympic and Paro Olympic Games and they
are expected to draw millions of
Spectators here to the French Capital as
well as billions who will watch the
competition from home now previous
Olympics have been targeted by cyber
attacks and experts fear that this year
could be no different so how is the team
here in Paris preparing our science
editor Julia Seager has been looking
into that she's with me on the program
now Julia um there are concerns this
summer as I understand it simply because
Olympics are always a Target aren't they
that's right uh Olympics are always
targeted because of the media attention
and the exposure that they offer of
course because of worldwide broadcast
and and Transmissions I'd like you to
just imagine for a minute what would
happen if the lights in a stadium went
out during a competition the type of
chaos that could actually create or for
instance ticketing Systems Failing um
you know electronic timing that would
malfunction or even the it systems of
for instance a anti-doping lab that
weren't working that could anal totally
a competition right and that would be
devastating well those are just some of
the Cyber disaster scenarios that uh the
Olympic organizing committee has to face
now we're expecting um attackers to be
much more active much more aggressive in
the type of attacks of course it's
believed that it's the the level of
threat is going to be 10 times higher
than usual uh and uh hackers are going
to be seeking of course attention but
also gain because uh there's a lot of uh
it's very lucrative uh as a business now
there are many concerns especially uh
having to do with the disruption of the
opening ceremony which will happen as
you know on the San River the reason why
is because all eyes will be on that
opening ceremony that's really going to
uh give the overall tone if you will and
of course it's going to have much more
impact than hacking any other
competition now if you look at the last
15 years for instance uh Olympic Games
have indeed been hacked and more and
more it's actually G on Crescendo if you
look at Rio de Janeiro in 2016 50
million attacks if you look at London in
2012 22 million attacks 2020 and this
was a covid year so there wasn't even
any public there uh 450 million and it's
expected that in the Paris games there's
going to be eight times as many attacks
bringing that number to 3.5 billion
attacks that's huge and it's actually
the entire it system of the Olympic
games that will be targeted so that
includes of course the ticketing the
Press rooms as I said the broadcast um
but also the stadium access system and
it also includes having to uh secure
what we call critical infrastructure so
uh bringing the power supply to the
physical uh uh sites now what's also
important to understand why the number
of cyber attacks is going up Crescendo
like that uh exponentially it's because
we've digitalized everything so every
time you put text somewhere it's just
another entry point for attackers I mean
those figures you quoted are
extraordinary Julia 50 million attacks
in Rio de Janeiro and maybe as many as
three and a half billion uh in this
year's games what kinds of attacks are
we talking about here so first of all as
I said you have different types of
going to go for the financial gain so
they're going to uh maybe Implement
certain types of scams so perhaps create
falsattackers so you have attackers that are
e ticketing sites for instance or uh
and they could also deceive people by
using what we call fishing so pushing
people to click on fraudulent links or
pushing people to give their banking
information uh that's one thing they
could also use what we call ransomware
uh for instance to steal data from
partner companies but also from service
providers and think about all the
different Sur service providers
Transportation broadcasting
accommodation and so what they do is
that they blackmail them they take all
of the personal information of all these
people they blackmail them they ask for
ransom uh for them to them be able to
retrieve the data and then uh there's
activist so those are members of hacker
groups that are going to look for a
promotion and to gain media exposure and
they want to destabilize and they could
actually use a type of attack that we
call denial of service dos attacks which
uh pretty much is making a service
unavailable so you can attack a website
for instance with lots of Demands until
it actually breaks down and then the
third uh risk of of course is political
interference so that's an attack that's
going to be supported by a foreign State
and that's what we think happened during
uh the pong Chen Winter Olympics in 2018
uh because at the time they used a
program called Olympic destroyer and
they could actually use it once again in
Paris this year people weren't able to
get into the stadiums the opening
ceremony was disrupted because of that
malware and at first it was actually
attributed to North Korea but now it's
believed that the Russians could have
been behind it while using uh the modest
operandi of North Koreans so it's quite
complicated not always easy to to know
who's behind such an attack but what's
really important to understand here is
that all of the work to secure all the
cyber cyber space here in France it
actually started a year ago because
hackers tend to want to to infiltrate
way before they actually attack so they
could already be in certain companies in
the in the system in the it systems of
certain companies and so there's 10
million euros that were allocated to the
National agency that's in charge of all
the security of the it systems of France
that have been auditing all of the
stadiums all of the the the cities that
will be uh hosting some of the events to
make sure that there's no weak Link in
that chain and that people know what to
do in case there's a huge Cyber attack
during the games all right fascinating
thank you very much