The Paris Olympics are the highlight of 2024 for athletes – and for cybercriminals, who have devised fake ticket sales, Olympic-themed lotteries, free data scams and phishing campaigns to steal information. Plus, there’s the Russia factor.
Fraudsters have taken advantage of the public’s huge interest in watching athletes perform at their best at the Paris Games by launching fraudulent websites imitating the official ticketing site. More than 338 such websites have been identified since March 2023 – 51 of them have been shut down and 140 have been given formal notices, French broadcaster FranceInfo reported on June 9. The official site for buying tickets is tickets.paris2024.org,
Fraud sites like paris24ticket[.]com, tickets-paris24[.]com, tickets-paris24[.]com, billetterie-paris2024[.]Info, and tickets.paris24[.]org are selling Olympic tickets to spectators and collecting data in the process. Virus scan programs reveal that they contain phishing links.
Many of these sites, such as Ticket-Paris24[.]com and tickets-paris24[.]com, are almost identical to the official website in design and content. Another site, paris24ticket[.]com, defrauds people who already have tickets for an event but now want to attend another sporting event at the Olympics. It buys legitimate tickets and sells them fake tickets. In this way, scammers make more profit than by selling real tickets. The organizers of the Paris Olympics allow the transfer of tickets.
Streaming the Olympic Games is another lure. Victims eventually share their personal data and pay up.
Scams claiming to offer 48GB free data plans to users of all telephone networks have also surfaced, tricking users into giving out personal and credit card details. Fake contests have also been seen on social media.
Researchers say Olympic-themed lottery scams take advantage of the names of national lotteries and major companies such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Google. These scams mainly target users from countries such as the US, Japan, Germany, France, Australia, the UK and Slovakia.
Russian Attacks
Russia is barred from participating in the 2024 Olympics due to its invasion of Ukraine — a move that has angered Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.
India Today’s Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) team has found that several Telegram groups are planning and announcing cyber attacks on the digital infrastructure of the Paris Olympics and its host France.
On Monday Russian hackers announced their intention to direct their efforts to attack Olympic sponsors this week. “The only thing Russian participation needs here (at the Games) is a series of massive DDoS attacks on all sponsors’ resources,” the pro-Russian ‘Cyber Army of Russia Reborn’ group announced on its Telegram channel.
Anonymous Sudan, Noname057 (16), UserSec and ServerKillers are other pro-Russian hacktivist groups that Google says pose a “potential threat” to the Summer Olympics.
Narrative campaigns
There are misinformation campaigns on social media aimed at portraying Paris as an unsafe venue for the world’s biggest sporting event and damaging the reputation of the IOC (International Olympic Committee).
A Microsoft report said that Russian influencers identified as Storm-1679 and Storm-1099 have shifted their campaign from June 2023 to target the 2024 Olympic Games and French President Emmanuel Macron. Their online campaigns are encouraging people to fear violence in Paris during the Olympics.
A fake documentary called “The Olympics Have Fallen” – falsely claiming to be a Netflix production narrated by actor Tom Cruise – attacks the image of the Olympics. According to Microsoft’s report, it was created using AI-generated audio resembling Cruise’s voice and spoofed Netflix’s branding with fake five-star reviews from reputable media outlets.
Storm-1679 promoted the documentary on social media sites, engaging American and European users. They also tricked American celebrities on Cameo into recording videos that were edited into anti-Ukraine propaganda and advertisements for the fake documentary, creating the false impression of celebrity endorsement.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics saw 450 million cyberattack attempts.