A Non-Sports Nerd Talks About the Importance of the Olympics and Why Other Nerds Should Care

A Confession

Listen, if the title didn’t give you the heads-up, I really don’t know how else to say it: I don’t know anything about the Olympics. Sure, they throw a spear or a disk, do a jump or two, and maybe swim a bit, but if you asked me to tell you one cool fact, I would be swan diving with a torch between my teeth into the pool's shallow end. I can, however, tell you a non-cool fact: the Olympics is an absolute hotspot for cybercrime.

The cyber games have already begun

I can’t say I was exactly shocked to learn this. The Olympics is the definitive worldwide event; everyone knows the Olympics (even hermit nerds like me). Given that most of the planet has some skin in the games, why wouldn’t bad actors take this opportunity to do some damage and make some easy cash? According to Cisco, a partner of the Paris Olympics, over 450 million attacks occurred during the previous Tokyo games, and that number isn’t expected to shrink.

So, what does this mean for the athletes, the staff, the viewers, and the nerds who may not be watching? Despite our best intentions, we are no better at dealing with malicious digital attacks today than we were four years ago, and every human on this planet with an internet connection has a responsibility to help lower the number of Olympic attacks.

Staying cyber secure with the Olympics 

The Olympics’ official website has published an entire page on what you need to know about cybersecurity and the Olympic games. It’s an excellent primer for those less technically inclined to understand how they can protect themselves digitally and still have fun watching people throw disks at each other. So whether you are watching in person, through the app, or at your local hot-chicken wing emporium, consider some of the best practices they lay out and stay cyber secure with your devices. But there is one more thing we need to talk about.

We made it four paragraphs into this blog, but I’m sorry, now I have to talk about AI. We give a lot of our data away for free. When we post videos online of us reacting to the Olympic fan favorite, motorcyclist chainsaw juggling, we show our facial expressions, voice patterns, attitudes, and emotions. It’s all in good fun, and the idea of being connected to a massive social network is always compelling, but it’s also feeding a hazardous concept: AI deep fakes. And this kind of attack has only recently begun to show its ugly face (and it might be your face they are using).

AI deep fakes are basically the Mission Impossible movies that come to life but in a far more disturbing way. Rather than our hero wearing the face of an adversary to coerce some super secret information out of them, bad actors are wearing the faces of IT admins, customer support reps, CEOs, and many others on web calls to get the information they need to execute the next level of their attack. The technology is good enough to have already fooled tech companies, financial institutions, and numerous other businesses, and it will not stop there. This Dark Reading article can give you an idea of how AI is already being used to cause havoc with ai-generated fake news pre-Olympics; we can begin to imagine how this could only get worse.

How do I help the Olympics?

Unfortunately, it really comes down to us to stop this kind of behavior. While it’s asinine of me, or anyone, to ask that we stop posting information on the internet that can feed into generative AIs to create fake news and deep fakes, it’s not such a hard ask to verify the source. This one simple step of validating what we see and hear on the news and social media is crucial; to take it a step further, call out this behavior when you see it and inform others of bad actors. If you can’t find the truth, wait for other sources to present themselves before commenting and sharing. By being more informed and less reactionary, we can actively help curb bad behavior on the internet.

While the Olympics have already partnered with numerous cybersecurity vendors and have taken significant preparatory action to prevent attacks, they will happen. Whether through small-scale information-based attacks or large-scale heists, these global events will always attract the attention of the best and worst society. My ask is that we all stay skeptical of what we see and stay up to date on cybersecurity best practices at home, at work, or at our local Olympics events. Remember that in the world of cybersecurity, we either take the gold or suffer defeat together, so inform those around you about cyber awareness, and let’s have a safe 2024 Olympics!