The shocking news related to the 2018 Winter Olympics is that their website fell victim to a cyberattack just before the Opening Ceremony. On Friday (Feb. 9), it was confirmed that the servers were hacked but the hacker had not been identified until now. The internet protocol was disrupted by the cyberattack. A report by USA Today served as a resource for all of the information used in this article.
The organizers decided to shut down the whole server just to stop the hacking. This action harmed the official website of the Winter Olympics. As a result, the attendees could not print their reserved tickets.The Wifi also went down in the Winter Olympics stadium in Pyeongchang.
All operations were fully restored after 12 hours.
The source of the attack was not revealed
Though the source of the attack has not yet been revealed, according to Reuters, Mark Adams, a spokesperson for the International Olympics Committee, said that their purpose was to maintain “secure operations."
Russia responds to the hacking attack
Previously, it was conveyed by some cyber-security specialists that there might be a chance of a hacking attack by North Korea and Russia. The Foreign Ministry of Russia said that no Russian hacker was involved in this attack.
According to the Foreign Minister of Russia, the Western media wanted to start an investigation on the subject of ‘Russian fingerprints’ in the cyber-attack.
Russia was banned from the Olympic Games for the reasons involving doping. However, they refused to agree on the fact of any involvement in the cyberattack. Nevertheless, there has been some evidence against the Russian hackers.
Warning was given on hacking before the Olympic games started
The number of cyberattacks on the Winter Olympic games are increasing.
This news was declared by cybersecurity experts. The hacking was done by using the spear phishing emails which were loaded with doubtful links to tempt the victims into downloading a malware file to targeted organizations.
According to the McAfee Advanced Threat analysts, Gold Dragon was managed at those organizations which are affiliated with the Winter Olympics.
Gold Dragon malware is a data collecting implant which collects all the data from the target's system and cloud.
The whole process is controlled by the hackers and they can easily access the end-user device. All the personal and financial information of employee and customer, trade secrets and details of the Winter Games are also included in that collected data by hackers. However, important operations were not affected by the cyber-attack.
