Protecting the 2024 Paris Olympics Critical Infrastructure from Cyber Threats

The Customer: The Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games

In the summer of 2024, Paris became the center of the world, hosting more than 14,900 athletes and 11.2 million spectators across 35 venues in the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. For more than 1,000 years, the Olympic Games have served as a popular, multicultural festival shared by millions of people around the word. In 2024, they represented a new adventure for France, with the city transforming its iconic landmarks into sporting arenas to provide an outstanding backdrop for sporting prowess and offer spectators an unparalleled experience.

How Does The 2024 Olympic Games Ensure They Are Protected From Cyber Threats?

The 2024 Paris Olympics presented a colossal cybersecurity challenge that required the seamless integration of IT, OT and, IoT security. Amidst global political tensions and the uncertainty of building out and securing new physical infrastructure on a very tight deadline, the Olympics were undoubtedly an attractive target for cyber criminals, hacktivists, nation-state actors and others.

To prepare for these threats, the French Government appointed ANSSI, the French Cyber regulator, to work with selected cyber partners from the private sector. That included France-based MSSP Advens and solutions from Nozomi Networks. The expertise and technology of both companies were called upon to establish, build and execute a cybersecurity strategy to ensure the Olympic games ran without disruption and were safe from cyber-related attacks or outages.

The team of cybersecurity experts had just under six months to successfully design, deploy, test and manage a cybersecurity program to safeguard over 15 water systems, event venues, roadways, housing facilities and other critical infrastructure supporting the Olympics from cyberattacks.

Nozomi Networks and Advens Team Up to Protect 15,000 Athletes and 11 Million Spectators

With Nozomi Networks technology and expert support, the Advens team worked quickly to organize and train dozens of consultants and SOC team members who then completed security audits, penetration testing and red team exercises across more than 15 venues and CI sites. Based on this initial assessment round they proceeded to deploy more than 125 network detection and response (NDR) systems and 40,000 endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems to address OT security gaps that could impact the games and human safety.

By the start of the Olympic games, the team had successfully developed and employed a hybrid SOC approach to reduce daily alerts from over 5,000 to just 400. Pre-event penetration testing confirmed the Advens SOCs were well-prepared to detect and respond to upstream mechanism and the solution was easily switched to detection mode to quickly check and discredit a June 24th video release showing an alleged attack by Russian Cyber Army on a water treatment plant.

A Safe and Successful 2024 Paris Olympic Games

With Advens and Nozomi Networks, the 2024 Paris Olympic games were able to run smoothly and safely. Over 2 months, the platforms successfully managed 485,000 threat alerts and addressed 15 high priority cyber incidents. They also foiled 3 attempted cyberattacks targeting video systems within venues, which may have caused panic and psychological damage to both visitors and TV viewers.