The Olympics: A digital battleground where prevention is the best defense

Why the Winter Olympics are a prime cybersecurity target

The Olympics are an attractive arena for cyberthreats, as their global visibility, complex digital infrastructure, and immense operational pressure offer attackers both opportunity and impact. Politically or ideologically driven groups view the Games as a stage where a single, well-timed DDoS attack or damaging data leak can disrupt official services, undermine public trust, and embarrass host nations in front of a worldwide audience. These groups do not need extraordinary sophistication, only the ability to strike at a strategic moment to achieve maximum attention.

In contrast, state-sponsored attackers operate quietly and with long-term intent, infiltrating networks months in advance to steal sensitive information, surveil communications, or sabotage logistics and essential infrastructure. Their tactics often involve embedding advanced persistent threats deep within core systems, waiting for the ideal opportunity to compromise the integrity of the event.

The Olympics' vast digital ecosystem—including ticketing and accreditation systems, scoring platforms, broadcast technologies, and event management applications—also presents a highly lucrative environment for organized cybercriminals. For them, ransomware is a powerful tool: compromising just one critical component, such as ticketing or accreditation, can halt the seamless operation of the Games, and the immense time pressure often increases the likelihood that victims will pay to regain access quickly.

The digital attack surface of olympic infrastructure

Overlaying all these risks is the nonstop flow of communication and live broadcasting that defines the modern Olympic experience. Every moment is streamed and shared globally, giving attackers opportunities to hijack signals, disrupt transmissions, or inject manipulated footage or misinformation into live broadcasts.

Taken together, the Olympics form a digital battleground where hacktivists, nation-states, and cybercriminals all converge, each with different motives but drawn to the same high-value target. The combination of critical infrastructure, strict operational timelines, and unparalleled global attention makes the Olympics one of the most challenging and high-stakes cybersecurity environments in the world.

Prevention first: Eliminate weaknesses before they can be exploited

To protect such a high-profile event, the Olympics rely on dedicated cybersecurity command centers, ongoing red-team and blue-team simulations, strict network segmentation, and zero-trust access controls. These are supported by close coordination with telecom providers, law enforcement agencies, national cyber authorities, and public awareness initiatives.

However, there is another powerful way to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of applications and critical infrastructure: prevention. These are steps taken at the very beginning of an application's or device's life cycle to eliminate weaknesses before they can be exploited.

Protecting these systems begins with secure-by-design principles. During the design phase, architectures are built with security requirements in mind. Early threat modeling helps teams identify potential attack scenarios and mitigate risks before development even starts.

Next, secure development and testing, following established standards and avoiding common design flaws, greatly reduces the chances of introducing vulnerabilities. Continuous security testing throughout the development life cycle—static and dynamic analysis, dependency scanning, and penetration testing—helps detect weaknesses before release, when fixes are faster, cheaper, and less disruptive.

AppSec and secure-by-design principles

Application security (AppSec) is essential. AppSec embeds security controls, tools, and best practices directly into development workflows, often as part of DevSecOps practices. For an event as high-profile as the Cortina Winter Olympics, this means ensuring that every digital service—from mobile apps and APIs to backend systems—is resilient against cyberthreats from day one.

Integrating security into design, development, and testing can significantly reduce the attack surface, improve system reliability, and better ensure service continuity. Prevention complements operational security measures and is critical to protecting a complex digital ecosystem like the Games.

However, technology alone is not enough. Individual vigilance and awareness remain vital to preventing phishing, scams, and other human-targeted attacks that can bypass even the strongest defenses. The most sophisticated security architecture can be undermined by a single successful social engineering attack. Comprehensive training and ongoing awareness initiatives are an indispensable component of any Olympic cybersecurity strategy.