Hacking FIFA World Cup

Date: July 24, 2006
Source: technologynewsdaily.com


Despite more than five million unique firewall events that occurred each day --including 128,000 that made it past the network firewalls-- not a single security-related or application outage occurred from May 15 to July 9, on the world’s largest converged communication network built by Avaya Inc. (NYSE:AV) for the 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™.

The converged network Avaya built for FIFA handled more than 21 trillion bytes of voice and data traffic – including players’ and journalists’ accreditations, photo transmissions and match details sent around the world in real time and ultimately transmitted to millions of stadium spectators and fans worldwide. Avaya, a leading global provider of business applications, systems and services, is an official partner of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

Security consultants at the 2006 FIFA World Cup event removed 70-80 viruses/Trojans/malware during the event. These included a number of widespread malware that are currently circulating in the world, such as W32/Mydoom.M@mm, Net-worm.Win32.Mytob. All of the worms, viruses or Trojan incidents were brought into the network on laptops that were already infected. All of these malware were all detected and removed before the laptops were allowed to connect to the system.

Key to ensuring the security of the converged communication network for the FIFA World Cup was a world class Network IDS System (NIDS) called Sentarus that was provided to Avaya by Demarc Security. The NIDS detected in real-time, attempted attacks by hackers, malware, worms and viruses on the FIFA IT solution infrastructure. The NIDS analyzed and correlated data in real-time, and used both open-source and Avaya Labs tools to analyze network attacks, and to quickly rectify any potential problems.
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