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World Anti-Doping Agency Says It Was Hacked By Russia (theverge.com)
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is accusing Russian state-sponsored hackers of hacking its database of athletes involved in this year's Olympic Games in Rio. Whether it's in response to the WADA banning 119 Russian athletes from participating in the games due to a doping scandal, it has yet to be determined. The Verge reports: The agency claims the state-sponsored group Fancy Bear is behind the attack, although it doesn't clarify how that attribution was made. The accessed data included medical information, like Therapeutic Use Exemptions issued by International Sports Federations and National Anti-Doping Organizations. The group has reportedly released some of this data and threatened to release more. The attackers reportedly relied on spear phishing emails to gain access to the database and eventually used credentials specifically made for the Rio Olympic games. Fancy Bear was the same group responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee earlier this year.
And not surprisingly, the US was discovered to be doping at massive levels thanks to the hack. US gymnastics gold medalist "super-star" Simone? Caught doping, but got "doctor's permission" to dope.
So it's not surprising that after a US-led investigation "caught" Russia doping, it turns out that the US was doping just as much. The only difference is that the US rewrote the rules to allow their doping.
The ADAMS database is where athletes have to log in and report their whereabouts in order to be available for out-of-competition testing (the most reliable way of catching dopers). It is also where athletes and the doctors requested Theraputic Use Exemptions (TUE's). There HAS to be a connection to make that work. Like too many of these types of hacks, it was a a weak user password that was compromised.
So far the dump just shows that the American athletes were following the rules like they were supposed to. This hack is Russia's way to try to cloud the picture and make it look like the exclusion of their athletes was "unfair", when in actuality their ENTIRE anti-doping infrastructure was completely compromised (including test samples being swapped out at the Sochi games). FYI there is another more detailed MacLaren report due to come out next month. S