Imagine this. You’ve gotten off a plane. You’re aching, you’re at work, you’ve got a job to do. So you go to boot up your computer, and immediately, you find you’re being hacked. Welcome to the 2014 Winter Olympics!
Yes, as if all the real-life and political disasters weren’t enough, the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi are going precisely as well as you’d expect, in terms of cybersecurity. NBC News decided to see what would happen and, well, as reported by CNET, nothing good did happen:
NBC reporter Richard Engel worked with a security expert to set up two test computers in order to see just how quickly he’d be attacked when logging onto Russian networks. But, he reported, when sitting down at a cafe with the expert, “before we even finished our coffee” the bad actors had hit, downloading malware and “stealing my information and giving hackers the option to tap or even record my phone calls.”
He wasn’t working with the NBC IT department, either — the computers were set up by two members of Kaspersky Labs, one of the preeminent cybersecurity firms in the world. Both experts agreed there were simply too many phones and devices and protecting them was more or less impossible. In other words, Russia has done a bang-up job convincing the world that every single Yakov Smirnoff joke is 100% true. Go team!
via CNET
(Image courtesy of Shutterstock.)