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

Not that hard...

[RollingThunder]

just don't hook one single system up to the Internet. Establish a private network (not VPN - actually private) for the entire thing.

Use dedicated hosting boxes, with ALL DYNAMIC FUNCTIONS OFF, that run NOTHING but the http server on the public interface. The secure FTP server runs on a dialup connection that only connects to the private network, with hardware authentication of the modems to each other.

Choose a bare-bones http server, with no bells and whistles. Both IIS and Apache are out. Maybe thttpd? Not familiar enough with it, to be honest.

Yes, you're going to have to work around not having dynamic portions or ubiquitous connectivity, but you're having to choose, flexibility or security.

Would this make for an enjoyable online olympics? Probably not, but that wasn't really what the story addressed. :)

IBM passed on the job

[Lumpish Scholar]

... because they wanted to control it all, including everything on the Olympics.com Web site.

http://www.forbes.com/2000/08/23/feat.html