<nettime> olympics hacks ?

[dr wooo <vornman@excite.com>]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000709/A60504-2000Jul8.html

NATIONAL NEWS    

FBI ready for Olympic cyber war    

By GARRY BARKER
TECHNOLOGY REPORTER
Sunday 9 July 2000

It's cyber war on an Olympic scale. The hackers of the world are
gathering, ready for the great hack of 2000 - an attack on the Sydney
Olympics websites.

Ranged against them in the battle of wits and technology are the FBI,
Australian police computer crime experts and technicians at IBM and
Telstra. 

IBM, which is handling the Sydney Olympics vast Internet and
communications systems, says its firewalls and other defences won't be
easy to breach. If a hacker does get in, they risk swift retribution from
watching crime experts. 

The defenders sound confident but, according to some local hackers,
members of international groups have already been moving in and out of
sites related to the Games, seeking weaknesses they can exploit in
September. 

The FBI's computer crime division in Washington DC has already taken
action.  When hackers recently diverted visitors to the Nike website to
S11, an Internet activist website based in Melbourne, the G-men tapped
into the service providers database looking for links that would identify
the hackers.

IBM spokeswoman Natalie Harms said the security of the Olympics sites was
of "paramount importance".

"We take this very seriously and we are doing a lot of work in planning
and preparing our systems," she said.

IBM provides Web and other communications systems for many of the world's
greatest sporting events, including the Australian Open tennis tournament.

"I am not aware of any of them having been successfully hacked," Ms Harms
said. 

"We can't talk about what we are doing. We don't want to give anyone any
clues." 

The hackers main targets will be the four massive computer farms, three in
the US and one in Australia, that will carry the huge traffic expected
through the Olympic websites. These will be monitored by technicians
skilled in detecting intrusions and tracing hackers' electronic trails.

"We expect to handle more than one billion page views, equivalent to about
six billion hits, during the Games," Ms Harms said.

"That's vastly more than we get for the Australian Open and about 10 times
the traffic on the sites we ran for the Winter Olympics in Japan." 

An internal communications system, running on Telstra equipment, will
carry news stories, results and athlete profiles. IBM will even provide
information for radio and TV commentators calling individual events in the
32 Olympic venues.

 

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