Thursday 4 July 2013

BT reveals over 200 million hack attempts on London Olympics 2012 website

The London2012 website had almost 40 billion page requests BT revealed
The London 2012 website was subjected to over 200 million attacks during the two-week event, BT has revealed.

BT managed the official website for the Games, serving up over 40 billion page views during the event. Speaking almost a year after the event took place, the chief executive of BT Global Services, Luis Alvarez, revealed the extent of the threats the firm faced.

“During the Olympics we had more than 212 million malicious attempts to damage the website,” he said. No more information was given on the types of attack or when they occurred, but the figure underlines the scale of attacks made on major websites.

Alvarez made the comment as part of a wider discussion on the fact security has become one of the first issues the firm is talking with its customers about, as threats to their networks increase all the time.

“Security is the hottest topic this year. This is because people are reading more about it and because every single company is being attacked,” Alvarez explained.
He cited attacks on oil company Saudi Aramco and issues being seen by US banks as just some of the headline-grabbing incidents firms are seeing as evidence they need to boost their security measures.

After the Olympics last year, BT revealed that the London 2012 website was, at the time, the world's most popular sports website, with 38.3 billion views, peaking at some 98,871 per second. This equated to 1.2 petabytes of data being transferred during the two-week period.

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