Radware – Alert: Hacktivists Poised to Disrupt Paris 2024 Olympics with Cutting-Edge DDoS Attacks

Overview

• Radware’s cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) team assesses DDoS attacks targeting the digital infrastructure of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
• Intelligence suggests hacktivists will create chaos by focusing on high-visibility targets like ticketing, streaming and betting platforms to advance their political agendas.

Background

• In 2016, threat groups targeted public-facing properties and organizations affiliated with the Rio Olympic Games. They launched sustained, sophisticated, large-scale DDoS attacks that reached up to 540 Gbps and were fueled by an internet of things (IoT) botnet coupled with a few other botnets. These Olympics-related DDoS attacks used UDP reflection/amplification vectors to power a large portion of the attack volume. DNS, chargen, ntp, and SSDP were the main vectors, but direct UDP packet-flooding, SYN-flooding, and application-layer attacks targeting web and DNS services were also observed. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics witnessed an unprecedented 450 million attacks. For the 2024 Paris Games, the onslaught could be even worse.
• In June 2024, Russian hacktivist groups HackNeT and the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn claimed a series of DDoS attacks against French websites (see Figures 1-4), including those of the La Rochelle International Film Festival and the Grand Palais. The Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, which Mandiant linked to the Kremlin, referred to these attacks as “training,” suggesting they were testing their capabilities in preparation for larger-scale disruptions during the Olympics.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT