Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan announced yesterday that security costs for Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics could reach up to $1-billion. But how much of that money is allocated to the IT security threats that might arise during the Games?
With the Games comes an incredible amount of digital video and data. With hundreds of events and thousands of hours of programming, just keeping track of everything is quite an ordeal. The scores and times of each competition at the Games come in fast and furious over the three week event.
Making sure that all of the data is safe and secure should be an extremely high priority of the Vancouver team. Can you imagine the worldwide embarrassment we’d experience if a hacker was able to mess around with the scoreboard at a skiing event? Or what if someone was to tamper with the live video feeds that are distributed to countries across the globe?
With IT having playing a greater role with each passing Olympic Games, making sure everything goes off without a hitch should be a top priority for event organizations and it’s something we expect to follow as the Games get closer to kicking off.
On a related note, IT security should also be top of mind for Canadian businesses during the Olympics.
During last year’s Summer Games in Beijing, I did a story about making sure IT managers implement a clearly defined acceptable use policy on video streaming and Web surfing. Security firm Fortinet Inc. argued that the higher volume of digital traffic flowing during the Olympics will attract the attention of cyber criminals and increase your risk of being attacked.
While probably a little overblown, there’s no question that hackers are becoming more and more innovative and will try and take advantage of high-traffic online events (see the Obama inauguration malware scams).
This will be something that most businesses should probably be concerned about year round, but the Games might provide a good opening to get started.