Get ready for Olympic-size threats during the Paris games

The run-up to the Olympic Games in Paris this month has been electrifying — and terrifying. The games begin July 26. 

Images shown online display routes through the city as completely painted purple. Beautiful!

And did you see the new Tom Cruise movie, “Olympics have fallen”? It’s about a terrorist attack that disrupts the Olympics. That movie echoes reports that Paris residents are buying property insurance because experts predict terrorism during the games. 

A recent France24 report claimed that 24% of tickets were returned out of fear of terrorism. And both French and American authorities, including the CIA, warn travelers to avoid the Games because of the risk of terrorism.

Except there’s a catch: none of this happened. It’s all fake. The purple paint story was a set of AI-generated images first circulated on a Chinese social network called Xiaohongshu by a Chinese user. 

The Tom Cruise “movie” was made using AI by an organization called Storm-1679, a Russian disinformation group identified by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center that is actively engaged in a sophisticated influence campaign aimed at disrupting the 2024 Paris Olympics. The same organization generated and propagated the fake news about terrorist concerns. AI-generated images created and distributed by Storm-1679 showed fake graffiti in Paris threatening violence against Israeli visitors attending the games.

A Microsoft Threat Intelligence report says Russia’s aims are to discredit the International Olympic Committee, France and the city of Paris and create fear around terrorism to reduce attendance. 

(The Russian government wants to wreck the games presumably because Russian athletes are banned from competing under their national flag and can only participate as “Individual Neutral Athletes” due to Russia’s state-sponsored doping program and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.)

In Paris, fake…everything, it seems

Scammers galore are looking to fake their way into Olympic gold (or Bitcoin). Researchers at threat intelligence provider QuoIntelligence found that sophisticated fraudulent websites are selling fake tickets to the Olympics, mainly to Russian customers seeking to bypass sanctions imposed on them in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Organizers have identified 77 fake ticket resale sites.

In the run-up to the Olympics, Paris authorities have been cracking down on counterfeit luxury goods like fake Nike shoes and copies of Louis Vuitton bags. They’re especially targeting sellers in high-counterfeit areas near Olympic venues, where they’ve shut down 10 stores. The Seine-Saint-Denis suburb, where the Olympic Aquatic Center will host various events and the closing ceremony, has been a particular focus of these efforts. French authorities have been working diligently with UNIFAB (Union des Fabricants), providing extensive training to more than 1,200 customs agents to help them identify counterfeit Olympic-related merchandise, including clothing and the official mascot, Phryges.

Even in a normal year, France’s counterfeit luxury goods problem is big. Last year, customs seized 20.5 million knockoffs, a 78% increase over 202. 

French authorities deployed 70 agents specifically to track illegal activities on the internet related to counterfeit goods. And they’re going all in on AI tools. The French anti-counterfeit authorities use AI and advanced computer vision technologies to combat fake goods in the online marketplace. These technologies enable efficient scanning and analyses of large volumes of online product listings, looking at both images and text-based information.

Olympic-sized cybersecurity

While Paris officials are coping with a deluge of fake movies, news, clothes and  tickets, they’re also dealing with an extraordinary cybersecurity landscape.

The Olympics brings together the world’s government officials — especially French leaders — in close physical proximity to random, unvetted international visitors. This unusual scenario is a big opportunity for cyber spies to steal confidential data, which could include strategic plans, personal information and government communications. 

Given the intent for Russian and other state-sponsored actors (and probably malicious actors and hacktivists) to disrupt the games, official Olympics infrastructure will be heavily targeted for distributed denial of service attacks, website defacement, wiper malware and other attacks. 

We can also expect to see new kinds of AI-powered synthetic identity fraud attacks. 

Paris is expecting around 3 million visitors coming to the games. Wi-Fi hotspots will likely to be targeted with man-in-the-middle attacks, where data interception is attempted. 

Cyber attackers are also using the Olympics as a backdrop for techniques like domain spoofing, URL shortening, HTML email spoofing, and lookalike Unicode domains to trick users into providing sensitive information.

French authorities are relying heavily on advance threat intelligence, as well as AI-powered tools for predictive analytics, biometric authentication and advanced liveness detection.

Why we should pay close attention to the Olympics

The Paris Olympic Games represent a glimpse of the future. While past Olympic Games had challenges on a number of fronts, this year’s Olympics are the first to take place in the era of widely available generative AI. 

They’re also the only Olympic Games in history to take place in Europe while international war was also happening in the area. Russia is the aggressor in that war, mostly banned from the Olympics, and also the world’s leading power in the realm of disinformation and information warfare. Russia’s motivation and capability to wreck the games are high. 

This confluence of meta-factors most likely represent some future global status quo. We are entering a new era of AI-generated fake everything — fake sites, fake identities, fake news, fake products, fake services and more. And we’re already well into an era where geopolitical conflict plays out locally in a way that affects corporations, schools, hospitals and citizens directly. 

And, of course, we’re definitely at the beginning of an age where advanced AI is required for both for cyberattack and cyber defense. 

So, enjoy the Olympic Games. Root for your favorite countries and athletes and watch the drama unfold. But also watch how Paris performs with the enormous challenges of fakes and cyberattacks. And, in the aftermath, look for lessons learned. The Olympics this year will prove to be a laboratory for threats — and defenses against those threats — that are coming our way in the next few years.