Slashdot Mirror
Aggressive Hackers Are Targeting Rio's Olympics (fastcompany.com)
The Daily Dot is warning about fake wi-fi hubs around Rio, but also networks which decrypt SSL traffic. And Slashdot reader tedlistens writes:
Steven Melendez at Fast Company reports on the cybercrime threat in Rio, and details a number of specific threats, from ATMs to promotional USB sticks to DDoS attacks [on the networks used by Olympic officials]... "Last week, a reporter for a North Carolina newspaper reported that his card was hacked immediately after using it at the gift shop at the IOC press center. And on Friday, two McClatchy reporters in Rio said their cards had been hacked and cloned soon after arrival."
Even home viewers will be targeted with "fraudulent emails and social media posts" with links to video clips, games, and apps with malware, as well as counterfeit ticket offers -- but the threats are worse if you're actually in Rio. "In an analysis last month of over 4,500 unique wireless access points around Rio, Kaspersky found that about a quarter of them are vulnerable or insecure, protected with an obsolete encryption algorithm or with no encryption at all."
Even home viewers will be targeted with "fraudulent emails and social media posts" with links to video clips, games, and apps with malware, as well as counterfeit ticket offers -- but the threats are worse if you're actually in Rio. "In an analysis last month of over 4,500 unique wireless access points around Rio, Kaspersky found that about a quarter of them are vulnerable or insecure, protected with an obsolete encryption algorithm or with no encryption at all."
Welcome to the third world. I suspect this will give some pause to even those corrupt Olympic committee members who accepted the bribes to give the nod to Rio.
People will look fondly back to where the major inconvenience was to put the toilet paper in a trash bin rather than flush it down in Sochi. Brasil has consistently snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at every turn.
I'm all for spreading around the wealth, but there should be some basic litmus test of "you can or cannot achieve even the most rudimentary accommodations for both athletes and visitors. It was pretty clear that Brasil wasn't in a position to pull this off, yet here we are.
But it's a fucking shambles over there at the moment. Tech failures, controlled explosion of a bomb(least it was caught I guess), a media tent got a bullet through it, security failing miserably allowing people without credentials to get in, Swedish rowing coaches got mugged apparantly, a media cameraman had his camera stolen, unsafe bike track and a few foreigners were apparantly kidnapped a day ago. Pretty poor turnout for a lot of events as well.
Let's hope there's no more issues.
The Olympic committee has issued a decree that hackers cannot hack them. Also, if hackers do try to hack them they are not allowed to use any of the trademarks - including the word "Olympic" or the 5 rings symbol - in reference to their planned hacks.
Do you have ESP?
"the international hub for the Olympics, was found to host many networks that are capable of decrypting Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) traffic — undoing a protocol put in place to keep data protected." link
Only if the client desktop computer is configured to accept forged certs as used in the Cisco SSL Inspection device.
The Olympics is rarely a net gain for the country hosting it. Despite lots of tourism and lucrative media contracts, the cost is so high that usually they are coming out behind on the deal. Now that's ok for a country with a lot of money, who doesn't mind spending some on this kind of thing and maybe has a plan for the facilities after the games. However for a country like Brasil it is basically just a loss.