As it was being expected and reported for the past couple of months, the South Korean Winter Olympics was vulnerable to a hacking attack.
This fear came true when the internet networks at the opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics were paralyzed by a cyberattack in what seemed to be an effort to embarrass organizers.
According to the spokeswoman for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, Yu Chae-yeon, both the WiFi and LAN communications failed due to the cyber hacking activity that happened during the opening ceremony. This also prevented tickets from being printed through the official website.
Winter Olympics cyber team was not able to restore the system until the following day, at around 8 a.m.
According to Yu, the organizers and investigators are in pursuit of the culprits responsible for this cyber crime.
A cyber security professor at the South Korea’s Hoseo Technical College, Hwang Jun-won, accepts that this incident surprised the team as they were already prepared for such an attack and has even hired a special team to prevent such attacks
He further stated that due to the specific nature of cyber operations that are being performed at the Winter Olympics, this global event is becoming more vulnerable to cyber attackers who seek out to exploit the lack of security discipline among personnels that were brought together from many different organizations.eee
According to Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence division, it was later found out that the hackers knew server names, usernames and passwords that were used in the infrastructure of the Pyeongchang Olympic Games.
The samples of the Olympic destroyer indicates that the hackers did not attempt to steal any information, according to Cisco Talos as it identified 44 separate individual accounts in the code.
According to their analysis, only destructive functions were performed by the hackers. But as the number of threats indicate, more is expected in the future.
