THE GAMES BEGIN

French Officials: Cyberattack During Olympics Is Inevitable

French authorities believe foreign hackers may attempt to straddle the Olympics with a DDoS attack.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told reporters on Thursday that a cyberattack on the Paris Olympic Games is an inevitability. “The key is to limit their impact,” Attal told Reuters. Fears of a massive DDoS attack or other possible cyberattack among French authorities were heightened following an attack on French websites by a Russian hacking group on June 23. The People’s Cyber Army took down the websites for Grand Palais art museum in Paris and the Festival La Rochelle Cinéma, according to Telegram communications from the group captured by Cyble. The group teaches users how to launch a DDoS attack, or a distributed denial-of-service attack, which involves sending thousands of gigabytes of data to a network every second to shut it down. During the Tokyo Olympics, hackers launched 450 million attacks, according to Axios. The fear among French authorities is that an attack will shut down ticketing systems, preventing attendees from entering the events. “The recognition of how important the availability of these services is, that’s what makes it an enticing attack surface,” Hardik Modi, vice president of engineering at the cybersecurity firm, Netscout, told Axios.