In the months leading up to the Tokyo Olympics, intelligence agencies and cybersecurity experts alike warned of the risks of cyberattacks and the need to exercise preventative measures to prevent the kinds of incidents we have seen in the previous Olympics at Rio de Janeiro, Sochi, Pyeongchang and London. Fortunately, the International Olympics Committee and the local organizers of the Tokyo Games, the Tokyo Organizing Committee, needed no convincing.
Over the course of this years games, it’s become increasingly clear that the organizers did indeed exercise preventative measures and that despite the challenges and limitations of holding an Olympics in the mist of a pandemic, the Tokyo Olympics have been a real success story from a cybersecurity perspective. Organizers of all large-scale, televised sporting events should look to this year’s games as a model to emulate.
Learning from the lessons of past Olympic games the International Olympics Committee fortunately did not make the same mistake. While this year’s games have not been entirely free of an incident (there was a relatively minor one early on, for example), the kinds of incidents that specialists are most concerned about with large-scale events like these are the those that shut down critical parts of the infrastructure such as ticketing, scorekeeping, or media broadcasting.
In fact, something like this almost occurred at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, in which the Opening Ceremonies were nearly brought to a halt. The fact that there was not an equivalent malicious event during the Tokyo games is no accident or stroke of luck. In this day and age, that’s extremely unlikely. Instead, the lack of incidents at the Tokyo Olympics tells us that aggressive preemptive measures were taken.