By Andrew Warshaw
May 6 – One of the world’s leading sports security experts has warned that cyber attacks are the biggest growing threat to major football tournaments as well as other key sporting events.
Malcolm Tarbitt, executive director for safety and security at the International Centre for Sport Security, says infiltrating the system will become “more advanced and severe” as hackers target sponsors and broadcasters in order to cause maximum disruption.
“The opening match of the Brazil World Cup had 10,000 credible attacks alone,” Tarbitt revealed. “They tried to target the lighting, the broadcasting, the ticketing systems, the surveillance, the power – everything..”
“This will become more advanced and more severe. (The) London 2012 (Olympics) had more than 50 million cyber-attacks within the first week. That is a staggering figure.”
Tarbitt, who was head of security logistics at the 2010 World Cup and an advisor to organising chief Danny Jordaan, made his alarming comments at this week’s Soccerex Asian Forum in Jordan and expanded on the same theme in an interview with Insideworldfootball.
“Even though the Brazilian authorities spent millions on a massive cyber security project, cyber attacks over the period of the Brazil World Cup were a massive thing,” he said. “The scale of it was the last thing I expected. It really shocked us. Most people focus on operational security like terrorism.”
“There are various forms. They can either hack in successfully or do what’s called a ‘Denial of Service’ attack. During (the London Olympics in) 2012, there were over 200 million such attacks of one kind or another where services were tried to be denied. At one point, there were 11,000 emails coming through per second.”
Tarbitt said the reasons for cyber attacks ranged from personal satisfaction to anti-authority perpetrators trying to prove a specific point.
“Sometimes it’s the big bucks they want to hit, or a sports federation, in terms what they stand for. Maybe it’s crime and they are being paid to try and access data to on-sell it. Conversely it could just be a 14-year-old kid with no malicious intent.”
But Tarbitt said the scale of the problem cannot be under-estimated.
“They are getting smarter and more severe. If it gets to the stage where, say, you can switch the lights off during a World Cup, imagine the impact on sponsorship rights. Imagine 15 minutes of downtime before the lights come on again. That means they’ve lost 15 minutes of what they’ve paid for in terms of broadcast rights.”
So how to combat it? “The best thing you can do is develop a strong programme, try to be one step ahead, pick up the attack, and contain it. But it’s certainly become a growing threat.”
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