#TOKYO DETECTIVES CYBER FREE#

The same applies to this year’s Olympics. The fact that foreign actors did not successfully interfere in the election was not a sign that the preemptive actions were a waste of effort but rather a success. Another recent success story in which the same approach was used was the 2020 presidential election, further proving that investing in proactive, robust cybersecurity measures works.

Again, it’s defense through preventative offense. What I’m confident played an essential role in the Tokyo Olympics, having been relatively uneventful from a cybersecurity perspective, is intelligence-driven defense, or the act of looking for known threat actors through the kind of characteristic behaviors they are known to exhibit. On top of this, we also know that numerous private security firms from various countries, including Japan, Taiwan and even Israel, have also been recruited to help in what seems to reflect the growing (and necessary) trend of cooperation between government organizations and private tech companies in the area of cybersecurity. While the pandemic may have made the logistics of such collaboration more involved, there would nevertheless have been a joint command center in some shape or form in which the specialists from these agencies can share information in real-time. For the U.K., that would be MI5 and the SIS, and so on.

For the U.S, that would likely be the FBI, NSA and CISA. Since the Olympics are inseparable from world politics and diplomacy, we can be certain that these analysts represented all the key security and intelligence agencies from the major countries coming together in collaboration.

And while I do not know, in this case, what each and every one of those measures was precise, I know which basic principles were observed. Instead, the lack of incidents at the Tokyo Olympics tells us that aggressive preemptive measures were taken. In this day and age, that’s extremely unlikely. The fact that there was not an equivalent malicious event during the Tokyo games is no accident or stroke of luck. In fact, something like this almost occurred at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, in which the Opening Ceremonies were nearly brought to a halt.

#TOKYO DETECTIVES CYBER FREE#

While this year’s games have not been entirely free of an incident (there was a relatively minor one early on, for example), the kinds of incidents that specialists such as myself are most concerned about with large-scale events like these are the those that shut down critical parts of the infrastructure such as ticketing, scorekeeping, or media broadcasting.

Learning from the lessons of past Olympic games, the International Olympics Committee (IOC) and the Tokyo Organizing Committee (TOC) fortunately did not make the same mistake. We also know that large-scale sporting events such as the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and the Olympics-for various reasons, including the market size of these events and their modern reliance on digital technology-are frequently the target of cyber threats. We know the rate of cyber threats is increasing, with ransomware attacks having spiked 150% in just one year and state-sponsored cyberattacks, also known as advanced persistent threats (APTs), having doubled in three years. ” A common problem that we see in the cybersecurity field is that far too many organizations wait until they’ve been attacked. As coaches often like to say, “The best defense is a good offense. One of the things that the Tokyo Olympics got right from a cybersecurity perspective is a principle often taught, suitably enough, in sports.

Tokyo detectives cyber