The official Olympic Games 2004 IT partner, Atos Origin, says the 16 days of the event saw more than a million IT security alerts, of which 430 were rated as high-level alerts.
Atos Origin`s executive VP for the Olympics, Jean Chevallier, told a media briefing in Sandton last week: "Atos Origin experienced security incidents whereby people attempted to disconnect the Olympics intranet, which provided information to athletes, results and schedules, in order to connect their personal laptops to the Internet.
"Journalists also tried to break into the intranet to gain access to results, schedules and personal information of the athletes," said Chevallier.
"Intrusions also included attempts to integrate unauthorised computers, administrative login attempts and network scans.
"It was an intense and exciting moment to see all this people trying to log in, but our IT team was able to respond fast to all the critical alerts and prevent any unauthorised access.
"Security was built in from the outset to keep the network completely separate from the Internet. All IT systems were equipped with the standard range of security, from anti-virus software, to intrusion detection systems and other administration tools.
"The security solution built into the IT infrastructure prevented any attacks from viruses and hackers, and the results were relayed to the world and to the media in Athens accurately and in real-time."
According to Chevallier, Atos Origin`s Olympic IT team managed to finish the job successfully, building in IT security for the Olympics through partnership management, integration control, operational and security testing.
"The people of Atos Origin will strive for the same excellence in Toronto 2006 and in Beijing 2008 as worldwide IT partner for the games."
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