In a recent report from the cyber security giant McAfee, stated that organization associated with the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics were targeted by what they’re calling a “hacking campaign.” However, that wasn’t the only cyber-attack aimed toward the Winter Olympics, sadly to say for such a popular and highly publicized event, cybercrime happens all too often, and the attack on the organizations wasn’t the only one aimed toward the Winter Olympics. Cybercrimes usually have an end goal for some type of financial gain. However, for the Olympics, it appears that this hacking “campaign” seemed to have another end goal, and that is to cause disorganization and chaos with the athletes and fans attending the games.

Officials at the Olympics confirmed that there was a cyber-attack on the games during the opening ceremony, however the committee decided not to reveal the attackers. Committee spokesman Sung Baik told reports that “All issues were resolved and recovered Saturday Morning.” Thankfully, the attack only had some minor implications, some of the winter games’ internal servers as well as the public Wi-Fi crashed, which led some people being unable to print out their tickets for the show.

After close evaluation from Cisco’s Tallos Intelligence Group, they concluded that the malware’s code showed there was no data that was trying to poach information. The malware unleashed on the winter games is being called a “Destructor”. Instead of stealing passwords or communications from officials, the attack made sure no information could be taken. The malware focused on deleting all data and copies of it on the Olympic servers. It attacked the recovery process and deleted all traces of the server’s memory. While the attack did not last long, with servers being recovered within 12 hours, further analysis suggests that the hackers behind it must have had inside information way before the attack spread including usernames, passwords and server names.

In cases like these it is interesting to dive into the psychology of a hacker and the reason behind why the malware was created. The hacker had important account information and could have done many things to harm the network for monetary gain, but instead decided to use this for sabotage. This emphasizes how important cyber security really is in today’s digital world. If one person with the know how wanted to sabotage an event as big as the Olympics, they pretty much could do it remotely if the proper security measures were not put in place to begin with.

This is the most dangerous aspect of cybercrime, not only could you lose information, time and resources a cyber-attack could focus on stopping an entire organization processes and day to day activities. Technology is crucial to running a successful business and having a good security foundation is more important today than it has ever been. From huge events like the Olympics down to a small business the idea of security is fundamentally the same.

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