The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said its IT systems are robust after going into meltdown on Friday as a result of the CrowdStrike outage and despite fears of a Russian cyber-attack at the Paris 2024 Games.
According to sources, the IOC’s chief technical officer was woken up at 2am Paris time after the botched CrowdStrike update, that affected 8.5m Windows devices. The IOC was able to secure a priority fix with the American company, which meant its systems were back online on Friday. Before then, security checks at the Games’ press centre were done manually using lists of names and the accreditation desk was closed.
Mark Adams, the IOC president’s spokesman, said: “There were some significant problems on Friday morning but it was dealt with. I’m not a technology expert but I would say it was quite a good rehearsal for the Games.
“Cyber-attacks are part of everyone’s daily life nowadays. There are phishing attempts everywhere. And the Olympic Games is a huge target. Needless to say, we have a huge amount of safeguards in place. We have been assured by our people, and by partners and Paris 2024, that we are very, very prepared.”
Russia successfully hacked the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics. “You can never be too prepared,” Adams said. “But we had a pretty close call in Pyeongchang, so we have experience, we know what we’re looking for. As far as we can, we have every confidence we know how to deal with it.”
Adams confirmed no efforts had been made to contact the Russian authorities and ask them not to target the Games with cyber-attacks. “Clearly there is a campaign of some sort going on,” he said. “It’s not the first time or the last time that the IOC became the target of misinformation. You’ll see it very clearly, particularly with the Tom Cruise film, it is getting more and more sophisticated.”
The IOC has ruled that some Russian athletes could compete at the Paris Games as neutrals, as long as they had no connections with the military. As a result 15 Russians and 17 Belarusians will be in Paris but will take part without flags, emblems or the anthems of their country. However, the Russian government has regularly criticised the IOC, and last year a Russian hacking group, Storm-1679, also released a video on Telegram called “Olympics Has Fallen,” using AI-generated voice purporting to be the Hollywood actor Tom Cruise. The IOC’s president, Thomas Bach, was also targeted by hoax phone calls from a Russian group pretending to be the African Union Commission.
Elsewhere, the IOC promised that there would be “some pretty heavy duty safeguarding going on” after Dutch volleyball decided to pick a convicted rapist for the Paris Games. Steven van de Velde was sentenced to four years in prison in Britain in 2016 after the rape of a 12-year-old girl two years earlier when he was 19. “I also believe the athlete is not staying in the village,” added Adams.
