We’re now in the middle of the 2020 Olympics Games in Tokyo — a moment of international connection after a challenging year when the COVID-19 pandemic postponed the original date of the iconic sporting competition.
While it’s a celebratory moment, speculation has ramped up about just how secure the global sporting competition is after all.
Concerns are justified. Both the 2016 and 2018 Olympic Games were targets of Russian hackers. In fact, the attack on the winter 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea went straight for the opening ceremonies, hitting stadium Wi-Fi and even affecting security gates, according to Wired.
Leading up to these games, cybersecurity experts and international watchdogs have been sounding the alarm that governments, Tokyo officials, sporting teams, and individual athletes alike should all be on high alert.
The Washington Post reports on some of the most common concerns surrounding this year’s Olympics. For example, the FBI was recently alerted to the potential of a major hack, aware that live broadcasts could be targeted as well as the personal data of athletes and their teams.
“In 2021, the Tokyo Summer Olympics may shape up to be what COVID-19 PPE and vaccine diplomacy was to 2020 — a clear opportunity for nation states to deploy information campaigns to denigrate their adversaries, promote their system of governance, and burnish their image on the world stage,” wrote Rachel Chernaskey, Max Glicker, and Clint Watts in a piece for the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, as cited by the Post.
Despite these concerns, the Olympics seem to be going along smoothly so far. Earlier, reports surfaced that Olympic ticket data was leaked, with IDs and passwords from the Tokyo Olympic ticket portal was posted publicly to a leak website.
A spokesperson for the Tokyo 2020 International Communications Team told ZDNet that this was not in fact a leak from Tokyo 2020’s system and that “we have already taken measures int he form of password resets to limit any damage for the very limited number of IDs detected in this case based on the information supplied by the government.
Cybersecurity officials will be ever present as the 2020 Olympics continue. The games run through the Closing Ceremony, which will be held on Sunday, August 8.
As the world continues to reckon with the ever-present threat of hackers who are growing consistently more sophisticated, vigilance over personal and government data will vault to the forefront of everyone’s minds as the summer games roll on.