Information Security On An Olympic Scale

jeffy124 writes: "Wired is running a story about the man in charge of securing the computer systems at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games next February. Matt McClung discusses how he's withstanding an 'overhype' in the media on the possibility getting his systems cracked and what he's doing to prevent it in the first place. With 4500 PCs and 550 servers, that shall be a daunting task, especially given the reliability problems at the '96 Atlanta games."

Comments

Re:Server to Desktop ratio

[homer_ca]

Those servers aren't just for their internal network. They are hosting the Olympic website too.

Security already not so great

[imrdkl]

Just looking at the Saltlake official webpage, I see only one link which uses encryption, and that's the signup link so that you can download a screensaver and get some kind of updates. Theres a tremendous amount of javascript there, and it's clearly being served already from M$.

We might already be too late to help them. :-/

Re:Tip for McClung...

[ocelotbob]

Don't use Winblows, use OpenBSD. All your security worries will just vanish into the night. :D

Not true. While OpenBSD is infinitely more secure than windows, thats only a small portion of the problem. You've got to train people to use decent passwords, audit the data so that you can tell exactly where the info is coming from, and design a contingency plan so that if someone does get through, the damage done is minimal. OBSD may be a better foundation, but it's far from being a magic bullet. Much of OpenBSDs security comes from the fact that the admins start with a sense of paranoia; it's very possible to have the same security level with other OSes, its just you've got to know what you're doing.

Re:Server to Desktop ratio

[instinctdesign]

Yup, its at least partially MS. Check out this article about the software from InternetWorld for details. A quote:

The sites will run on Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition, the company's high availability, highly scalable server OS. The software will run on hundreds of Compaq ProLiant 8500 servers, each with eight 700-MHz Xeon processors and 4 GB of RAM.