Nine blocked 93 million bad web requests during the 2024 Olympics
Nine Entertainment, the media organization that recently broadcast the Paris 2024 Olympics, blocked up to 96 million bad web requests from malicious actors and bots during the Games.
seen by TINewsNine’s chief technology officer of editorial and business practices, Andre Lackmann, said Nine uses Fastly to block requests from bots and malicious web applications and filters 1.2 billion attempts to access its media platforms every day.
However, during the Olympics, Lackmann said, the number of requests quadrupled, and during swimming and other specific events, the spikes grew even more.
“On all of those services, we have a 70 percent CDN download, so about 30 percent of that traffic comes through the WAF itself, and about 1 to 2 percent is blocked,” Lackmann said, speaking on Fastly. Xcelerate Conference in Sydney.
“If you do the sums there, there are millions of blocked requests that we would have a lot of challenges managing otherwise.”
While 96 million is a lot, researchers and cyber teams expected an increase in malicious cyber activity that would accompany the Paris Olympics.
After the games, French cyber authorities revealed that there were more than 140 cyber attacks during the games period.
According to media reports, from July 26 to August 11, the dates of the Olympic Games, the French government’s cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, recorded 141 cyber incidents, 119 of which were “events.” low-impact security incidents and 22 were incidents in which threat actors successfully breached the network. a victim’s information systems.
One-third of these incidents were downtime events, more than half of which were caused by denial of service (DoS) attacks, while the remaining attacks were attempted system breaches and data theft, some of which were successful.
These victims were largely related to the operation of the games, including transportation and telecommunications infrastructure, sports, and government agencies.
“All cyber events that occurred during this period were generally characterized by their low impact,” the agency stated.
The Olympic host nation expected an increase in malicious cyber activity, and France beefed up its security months before the games.
