Global sporting events have long served as a world stage, showcasing not only athletic prowess but also the host country’s vision and allure. However, putting on a modern, successful global athletic event now requires hundreds of billions of dollars – and with that huge expense and visibility comes unwanted attention from cybercriminals.
For over two decades, cyber threat actors have increasingly deployed distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to target events like the current Qatar World Cup. In the first half of 2022, there were already 6,019,888 global distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, according to NETSCOUT’s newest threat intelligence report.
Such attacks flood the target or its surrounding infrastructure with Internet traffic, causing the usual traffic of a targeted server, service, or network to be disrupted. With access to enterprise networks and web-based applications and services becoming more critical than ever, DDoS attacks can be fatal for any firm that relies on the Internet.
While DDoS attacks are not a new occurrence, they can cause huge disruptions for spectators, athletes, and organizations engaged in its success by attacking the digital infrastructure required to reach worldwide viewing audiences, which ranges from telecommunications to computerized scoring and video streaming.
Within the last ten years, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London were subjected to multiple DDoS attacks, including a 40-minute attack on the primary venue’s power infrastructure, which was most likely meant to interrupt the opening ceremony. The infamous hacking group Anonymous targeted soccer’s biggest global event in 2014, and the 2016 summer games in Rio de Janeiro were targeted by a large-scale attack from a DDoS-for-hire service known as LizardStresser, which began just prior to the opening of the games and increased significantly after the games began. The most recent 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo were also severely targeted, with over 450 million attacks reported.
It is critical for the host country, the games committee, sponsors, and even individual participating nations and athletes to maintain a robust cybersecurity posture. Sharing information and collaborating with commercial providers, such as telecommunications companies and internet service providers, is especially important because these organizations are frequently on the front lines when it comes to experiencing and preventing cyberattacks, which are becoming more common and severe. Clearly, due to the increasing frequency and complexity of DDoS attacks, a multilayer hybrid security plan is absolutely necessary.
