French authorities said on Tuesday that there were more than 140 cyber attacks during the Paris Olympics but none of them disrupted the competition.
Prior to and throughout the Olympics, France’s cybersecurity agency was on high alert for attacks that had the potential to disrupt the organising committee, ticketing, or transportation.
Between July 26 and August 11, government cybersecurity agency ANSI recorded 119 reports of low-impact “security incidents” and 22 incidents in which “malicious actors” successfully targeted a victim’s information system.
The attacks mainly targeted government institutions as well as sports, transport and telecommunications infrastructure, the agency said.
According to Ansi, one third of these were downtime incidents, half of which were caused by denial of service attacks designed to put pressure on servers.
Other cyber incidents involved, among others, attempted compromises or actual compromises and data disclosure.
“All cyber incidents that occurred during this period were generally low-impact,” Ancy said.
The Grand Palace, which hosted the Olympic Games in Paris, and about 40 other museums in France were hit by a ransomware attack in early August, but according to Ansee, it did not affect any information systems linked to the Games.
Ransomware exploits security vulnerabilities to encrypt and block computer systems, and demands ransom from the user or organization to unlock them.
During the Tokyo Olympics held in 2021, delayed by the pandemic, organisers reported 450 million such operations, double the number during the 2012 London Olympics.
Before the Paris Olympics, Marie-Rose Bruneau, director of technology and information systems for the Paris Games, said she expected cyberattacks to be “eight to ten times more” than those during the Tokyo Olympics.
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