Tag: Cyberattack

PyeongChang Olympic Games: Cyberattack

PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Games: Cyberattack

It’s during the opening ceremony of the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games that a cyberattack has aimed at the host infrastructure IT department.

Around 45 minutes before the start of the event, the servers and WI-FI network have been hit by an attack, which fortunately has not impacted the ceremony. However, in the Olympic Village, the press zone has been deprived of Internet connection and television. Furthermore, the official website of the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Games has been unreachable for hours, hindering web users to print their tickets to access to the event. 12 hours were needed to completely restore the services.

The CIO didn’t wish to communicate on this attack origin, but PyeongChang 2018’s spokesperson points that “there was a cyberattack, the server has been updated yesterday (Sunday February 11), and we know the cause of the problem. We know what happened, this is a usual thing during Olympic Games. We will not reveal the source.” The CIO’s communication director, has assured “We refuse for now to reveal the details of our investigation, but we will do it.”

A cyberattack with destructive aim

Talos Security company’s two researchers have analyzed the attack though and observed that the purpose was not to retrieve sensitive or personal data contained on the organization server, but clearly to interfere with the games ‘running.

The virus samples’ analysis allowed to highlight its main purpose: the destructive aspect. Concretely, the effects caused by this cyberattack, were to delete the events of the calendar and the documents, and above all, to make the affected machine inoperable.

PyeongChang Games, victims once again

At a global scale and ensuring a visibility of choice for cybercriminals, this is not the first cyberattack suffered by the PyeongChang Olympic Games. At the end of December 2017, the infrastructure was hit by an attack mainly consisting of the sending of emails to the event organizers. According to the McAfee company, those mails contained Word files infected by a virus.

Russia, North Korea: the different leads considered

The potential attack’s perpetrators could be Russia, of which the delegation has been denied of the Games for doping reasons: before the Games, McAfee declared to have information indicating that hackers located in Russia had planned attacks in retaliation.

A possible North Korean involvement was also mentioned, despite the rapprochement that could be observed by the viewers during the opening ceremony.

An attack that shows, once again, the IT infrastructures ‘vulnerability despite the means implemented.

A bad phishing story

A bad phishing story

A victim of phishing from 2015, asked her bank for a refund of 3300€, which was the amount diverted by a fraud author. However, during the legal procedure, the Justice has cancelled the judgement of the local court of October 2017, which has requested to the bank of the victim to refund the corresponding amounts of the phishing operation.

The reason of this cancellation? The victim has deliberately communicated some confidential data regarding her credit card, by falling into the trap of a phishing email (the scammer has posed as the telephone operator of the victim).

This cancellation argument argues that indeed, the mail didn’t have any recipient nor sender name and that the reject or unpaid mention was inexact. Also the victim could have prevented the trap set and not communicate her banking information. Therefore, it was her responsibility, which indeed cancels the request for the stolen money refund by the bank.

The majority of phishing websites use domain names associated to an existing activity or referring to an activity, with the aim to deceive users, by inviting them to click on the links of legitimate websites. It allows to increase the likelihood of the attackers’ success.

The phishing concept is to retrieve personal data on Internet via identity theft, adapted to digital support.

If it is true that fraudulent payment online is directly caused by the victim’s negligence, yet, she didn’t communicate neither her credit card confidential code, nor the 6 digit 3D SECURE code, which was sent to her by SMS to validate the payment. The victim has blocked her credit card the same day, after the reception of two 3D secure messages.

However, in this case, the bank affirms that regularly, it has raised its customers ‘awareness and communicated with them, in order to alert them of phishing risks and warn them to never communicate their confidential banking data.

Thus, the Court of Cassation has judged that the victim acted carelessly and could have prevented to fall into the trap of the fraudster.

Cyber threats heavily rely on web users’ bad practices, as the SANS Institute confirms. The threats the most frequently encountered in companies are phishing (72% of the respondents), spywares (50%) and ransomwares (49%).

According to the American company Webroot, about 1.385.000 unique phishing websites are created each month, with an impressive peak of 2.3 million during May 2017.

Be aware that these phishing websites stay active during a very short period: between 4 and 8 hours maximum, to prevent to be followed or blacklisted.

Of course, this case reminds that vigilance remains crucial more than ever!