http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-08-22-hackers-kept-out_x.htm By Patrick O'Driscoll USA TODAY 8/22/2004 NEA IONIA, Greece - In a post-9/11 world, even the computers that run the Olympics have color-coded warnings for threats. "Green is good. Red is very bad," says Jean Chevallier, executive vice president of Atos Origin, Paris-based head of the Games' $400 million information system. In between are yellow (mild) and orange (more alarming). Halfway through the Athens Olympics, the worst anyone has seen here is "a light yellow," Chevallier says. The threat? Some news people have unplugged official terminals in the press centers and tried to tap into the network with their own laptops, apparently thinking they can surf the Internet. They got nowhere. The network for the Games has no two-way link with the Internet. For event results, computer users click on a separate site, Athens2004.com, run by the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee (ATHOC). That site gets results only by one-way transmission from Chevallier's hacker-proof network. Chevallier, who also worked at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics, says a computer "bridge" made info-tech at those Games potentially vulnerable to outside attack. Although there were no breaches, thousands of alerts and alarms kept the IT team busy. This time, "the image of a hacker coming in from the Internet is obsolete ... impossible." Sounds like a perfect trash-talk challenge to byte heads with anti-Olympic fever. But Chevallier says the only way anyone could break in is from inside. Even then, odd traffic - logging in from the wrong place or trying to roam where not allowed - triggers lockouts and other safeguards. Network computers don't even have CD-ROMs, floppy drives or other outside data ports. "A few days ago, we saw somebody entered the computer room at a venue at 3 a.m. and tried to log in," Chevallier says. "They tried five or six times" and failed. The team's hub is at ATHOC headquarters, in an old shoe factory in this Athens suburb, two subway stops from the Olympic stadium complex. With 130 people at terminals and screens around the clock, it looks like NASA mission control. If info technology were an Olympic team, it would be the largest by far: 330 Atos Origin staffers and 2,300 info-tech volunteers at 36 sports venues and 26 non-sport sites. Coming from 44 nations, they run 10,500 computers, 900 servers, 23,000 desktop telephones, 13,000 cell phones, 9,000 two-way radios and 2,500 public information terminals. _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Mon Aug 23 2004 - 03:28:12 PDT