Winter Olympics targeted by hackers, McAfee says

Hackers have targeted an attack at organisations involved in the Winter Olympics next month and tried to access sensitive information about the upcoming games in South Korea, according to a report by a cyber security company.

 McAfee discovered a hacking campaign that ran from December 22 that it believes has the hallmarks of “a nation state adversary that speaks Korean”. But the company would not attribute the attack, as it is continuing its investigation.
The report comes as North Korea agreed to hold high-level talks with South Korea as part of an emerging detente. The talks next week will be the first between the two nations for two years and will focus on the North’s potential participation in the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

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Targets from ice hockey teams to ski suppliers were sent an email purporting to be from South Korea’s national counter-terrorism council. It contained a malicious document that if enabled would create a hidden back channel inside their computer for hackers to exploit.

 Ryan Sherstobitoff, a senior analyst at McAfee, said the hackers cast a wide net, including emailing generic addresses such as those beginning “info@” and it appeared that at least one of the recipients was infected by the malicious document. Once inside the network, a hacker may be able to gather more information.

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 “Theoretically, if they get into the network hosting the Pyeongchang email network for the Olympics, they have any number of possibilities moving inside. It depends where the networks are connected — to specific teams, committees, planners at a high level,” he said.

Mr Sherstobitoff warned the Olympics may suffer from more cyber attacks, as major events attract hackers from nation states and cyber criminals.

The Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cyber Security issued a report last year on the myriad ways hackers could try to undermine future Olympic Games, including adjusting automatic scoring, interfering with the care of athletes and disrupting events.

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The US blamed North Korea for last year’s WannaCry cyber attack that wreaked havoc across organisations worldwide including the UK National Health Service and delivery company FedEx. The country’s hackers were also accused of being behind the destructive attack on Sony Pictures in 2014, as the studio prepared to release The Interview, a movie that mocked the North Korean leader.

 McAfee said the hackers used a more sophisticated method than the average “spearphishing” attack, installing malicious software without making the victim download a file, which would often be flagged by a security programme.

 These fileless malware attacks using Microsoft Powershell are becoming an increasingly popular tactic, with the number of attacks more than doubling in the third quarter of last year, McAfee said.