A cyberattack paralyzed internet networks at the opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, in what appears to have been a bid to embarrass the organizers of the games.
Hacking caused both local area network (LAN) and wireless communications to fail during the opening ceremony on Feb. 9 and prevented tickets from being printed from the Olympics website, according to Yu Chae-yeon, a spokeswoman for the Pyeongchang Winter Games. The systems were restored at around 8 a.m. the following day and organizers are investigating who was behind the attack, she said.
The hackers knew usernames, server names and passwords used for the Olympic Games infrastructure, Cisco's Talos threat intelligence division wrote on its blog, saying it identified 44 individual accounts in the code. Samples of the "Olympic Destroyer" indicate the hackers did not try to steal information. Rather, analysis shows they performed only "destructive" functions. "The samples identified, however, are not from adversaries looking for information from the games but instead they are aimed to disrupt the games," it said on the blog. "It leaves us confident in thinking that the actors behind this were after embarrassment of the Olympic committee during the opening ceremony."
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