7 ms·

Visitors to Sochi Olympics will be instantly hacked

49 points by bdehaaff 13y ago

thogenhaven 13y ago
Gotta love American hypocrisy: "Proving yet again what a fabulous idea it was to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, NBC has discovered that all the Games' attendees can expect to immediately get hacked as soon as they get to Sochi." Wouldn't the US do the exact same thing if it was in the US?
- sneak 13y ago
  I'm sure the US is doing the exact same thing at Sochi, though likely with a bit more targeting.
  - honestanon 13y ago
    FIFY: I'm sure the US did this during the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. A lot of international leaders attended. I'm sure the was lots of targeting.
atmosx 13y ago
So let me get this into perspective: A US journalist is worried that Russian hackers[1] will hack into his computer the moment he turns it on at Sochi. Of course if the Olympics were held in Washington, he wouldn't be perplexed. He would probably be so sure about it, that it wouldn't even be worth mentioning. This post is an prominent example of propaganda: No technical details, just pure old FUD for the masses. Why and How did this came up in HN's frontpage (we're supposed to me technically speaking, above average when it comes to computers), is beyond me. [1] Tall guys, short blond hair, speaking English with as Russian accent as you can get, having obvious temper-control problems and always heavily armed (K-7 and a couple of bombs, just in case) even when sitting on a 11.6" inch laptop. Sorry, I forgot to add that they are probably sitting on a cold basement in Syberia.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  *Cyberia.
voltagex_ 13y ago
I'm gonna need to see some better sources for this claim. I mean, it's not unbelievable but it's lacking in technical detail.
- pyromine 13y ago
  I agree, this article gives little to any depth and makes broad claims with little substantial info. I think we all could discern that there would likely be a lot of more nefarious online activity surrounding these Olympics, but surmising that everyone will near immediately get their devices hacked is a bit much.
  - TwoBit 13y ago
    I gotta think that the primary concern is WiFi hotspots. It's easy to create a bogus hotspot that spies on your communications.
    - nwh 13y ago
      Call it Apple Store and the vast majority of iOS devices will connect to it automatically.
midas007 13y ago
Assume that hotels, regardless of country, are filming, tapping the phone and the internet. The other bit to realize is that there will be sex, around 100k condoms worth. That's 35 condoms per athlete on average. Certainly there's dirty laundry incentive for news and political orgs.
- TwoBit 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure those athlete sex reports are highly exaggerated. Those numbers are based on a ridiculous calculation where they took the number of condoms shipped to the Olympics and divided it by the number of athletes.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    You think it's just a few athletes having lots of sex? No wonder they are so fit!
    - sanswork 13y ago
      I think they are forgetting all the people visiting the city for the olympics that aren't competing in their numbers.
      - adaml_623 13y ago
        Actually these stories are generally talking about the number of condoms available to the athletes in the athletes 'village'. But generally the condoms are branded for the event (like everything else) and hance are souvenired in large numbers distorting any estimates of athlete nookie.
  - raganwald 13y ago
    Exaggerated in one way, possibly under-reporting in another. What if athlete sexual activity follows a power law? A very small number of athletes might have hundreds of hookups during the games while most may have zero or one.
- 13y ago
jewbacca 13y ago
Someone on Reddit seems to be claiming to have contacted the researcher behind this story: ---- Right technical post/description of how not to use technology coming up. TL; DR I guess if you can't operate a box then there isn't much hope of being able to operate a phone or a laptop. # Phone: User logs onto public wifi and was asked to run setup program to access internet, setup program was actually malware. Note, this was a "user initiated action" and whilst I realise that many people just download and run anything without even checking the permissions anyone with even a modicum of technical knowledge would not have been caught out by this. Also this would not affect iPhones since they cannot run apps that are not distributed via the app store. # Do not EVER use public wifi. * log into reddit and then anyone within wifi range can steal your reddit session (same for all sites that don't enforce https on every page). Ever seen that message that says "we couldn't verify the certificate for mail.google.com" (or similar) when accessing emails? This is because the people operating the wifi are intercepting secure traffic which means they can intercept any password sent over the network, so if you have mail configured and you click ok when that warning comes up (which 90% of users do unfortunately because it just looks like a normal alert rather than a really serious security warning) then they will have your email password. # Mac laptop: I actually don't know how this was done, I've contacted the guy from the video and he said he will write up a technical post on Friday. Out of the box, new macs only run code from the App Store so unless that setting was changed (in which case saying it was hacked is bullshit rather than a simplification) I just don't see how it could have become infected. Edit: Found out that they downloaded an antivirus software from a dodgy site and followed the instructions to allow it to run. If people are going to follow instructions to disable security on their computer then there really isn't much that can be done to help them. # Windows Laptop: They opened an email attachment in office and clicked "allow macros". Again, not something that a clued up user would do. Still something that Microsoft could handle better - make it something that has to be preconfigured rather than just giving the user the option since there really isn't any good reason for most consumers to be running macros. # In summary: Nothing new to see here and only one of the pieces of installed malware was of Russian origin so basically this is just a bit of a smear campaign. Sure the free wifi may be more dodgy over there than in the US/UK (yay for Britain) but it is not a problem limited to Russia, I had the same problem in Sri Lanka and public wifi is not secure and should never be used. ---- u/daniel_chatfield http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1x2t3j/all_visitors_to_sochi_olympics_hacked_immediately/cf7sbwo http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1x2t3j/all_visitors_...
gnur 13y ago
Instantly is a bit a overstatement. Whenever you connect to a public wifi hotspot and don't use some kind of tunnel (ssh/vpn) you run the risk of automatically downloading malware. Which isn't any different then any other place in the world. Whenever I connect to a public wifi hotspot I use a ssh tunnel, I wish them good luch injecting any malware in that stream.
stale 13y ago
"Proving yet again what a fabulous idea it was to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia..." I should have stopped reading right there :)
product50 13y ago
I have judged Marissa Mayer because of this article making into Yahoo Sports. Nothing has changed.
blueskin_ 13y ago
No detail. How were they 'hacked'? How did they notice?
eps 13y ago
You can tell it's going to be an excellent article when a flight to Sochi takes 75 hours.

49 points by bdehaaff 13y ago

Gotta love American hypocrisy: "Proving yet again what a fabulous idea it was to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, NBC has discovered that all the Games' attendees can expect to immediately get hacked as soon as they get to Sochi." Wouldn't the US do the exact same thing if it was in the US?

sneak 13y ago
I'm sure the US is doing the exact same thing at Sochi, though likely with a bit more targeting.
- honestanon 13y ago
  FIFY: I'm sure the US did this during the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. A lot of international leaders attended. I'm sure the was lots of targeting.

atmosx 13y ago

So let me get this into perspective: A US journalist is worried that Russian hackers[1] will hack into his computer the moment he turns it on at Sochi. Of course if the Olympics were held in Washington, he wouldn't be perplexed. He would probably be so sure about it, that it wouldn't even be worth mentioning. This post is an prominent example of propaganda: No technical details, just pure old FUD for the masses. Why and How did this came up in HN's frontpage (we're supposed to me technically speaking, above average when it comes to computers), is beyond me. [1] Tall guys, short blond hair, speaking English with as Russian accent as you can get, having obvious temper-control problems and always heavily armed (K-7 and a couple of bombs, just in case) even when sitting on a 11.6" inch laptop. Sorry, I forgot to add that they are probably sitting on a cold basement in Syberia.

tripzilch 13y ago
*Cyberia.

voltagex_ 13y ago

I'm gonna need to see some better sources for this claim. I mean, it's not unbelievable but it's lacking in technical detail.

pyromine 13y ago
I agree, this article gives little to any depth and makes broad claims with little substantial info. I think we all could discern that there would likely be a lot of more nefarious online activity surrounding these Olympics, but surmising that everyone will near immediately get their devices hacked is a bit much.
- TwoBit 13y ago
  I gotta think that the primary concern is WiFi hotspots. It's easy to create a bogus hotspot that spies on your communications.
  - nwh 13y ago
    Call it Apple Store and the vast majority of iOS devices will connect to it automatically.

midas007 13y ago

Assume that hotels, regardless of country, are filming, tapping the phone and the internet. The other bit to realize is that there will be sex, around 100k condoms worth. That's 35 condoms per athlete on average. Certainly there's dirty laundry incentive for news and political orgs.

TwoBit 13y ago
I'm pretty sure those athlete sex reports are highly exaggerated. Those numbers are based on a ridiculous calculation where they took the number of condoms shipped to the Olympics and divided it by the number of athletes.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  You think it's just a few athletes having lots of sex? No wonder they are so fit!
  - sanswork 13y ago
    I think they are forgetting all the people visiting the city for the olympics that aren't competing in their numbers.
    - adaml_623 13y ago
      Actually these stories are generally talking about the number of condoms available to the athletes in the athletes 'village'. But generally the condoms are branded for the event (like everything else) and hance are souvenired in large numbers distorting any estimates of athlete nookie.
- raganwald 13y ago
  Exaggerated in one way, possibly under-reporting in another. What if athlete sexual activity follows a power law? A very small number of athletes might have hundreds of hookups during the games while most may have zero or one.
13y ago

jewbacca 13y ago

Someone on Reddit seems to be claiming to have contacted the researcher behind this story: ---- Right technical post/description of how not to use technology coming up. TL; DR I guess if you can't operate a box then there isn't much hope of being able to operate a phone or a laptop. # Phone: User logs onto public wifi and was asked to run setup program to access internet, setup program was actually malware. Note, this was a "user initiated action" and whilst I realise that many people just download and run anything without even checking the permissions anyone with even a modicum of technical knowledge would not have been caught out by this. Also this would not affect iPhones since they cannot run apps that are not distributed via the app store. # Do not EVER use public wifi. * log into reddit and then anyone within wifi range can steal your reddit session (same for all sites that don't enforce https on every page). Ever seen that message that says "we couldn't verify the certificate for mail.google.com" (or similar) when accessing emails? This is because the people operating the wifi are intercepting secure traffic which means they can intercept any password sent over the network, so if you have mail configured and you click ok when that warning comes up (which 90% of users do unfortunately because it just looks like a normal alert rather than a really serious security warning) then they will have your email password. # Mac laptop: I actually don't know how this was done, I've contacted the guy from the video and he said he will write up a technical post on Friday. Out of the box, new macs only run code from the App Store so unless that setting was changed (in which case saying it was hacked is bullshit rather than a simplification) I just don't see how it could have become infected. Edit: Found out that they downloaded an antivirus software from a dodgy site and followed the instructions to allow it to run. If people are going to follow instructions to disable security on their computer then there really isn't much that can be done to help them. # Windows Laptop: They opened an email attachment in office and clicked "allow macros". Again, not something that a clued up user would do. Still something that Microsoft could handle better - make it something that has to be preconfigured rather than just giving the user the option since there really isn't any good reason for most consumers to be running macros. # In summary: Nothing new to see here and only one of the pieces of installed malware was of Russian origin so basically this is just a bit of a smear campaign. Sure the free wifi may be more dodgy over there than in the US/UK (yay for Britain) but it is not a problem limited to Russia, I had the same problem in Sri Lanka and public wifi is not secure and should never be used. ---- u/daniel_chatfield http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1x2t3j/all_visitors_to_sochi_olympics_hacked_immediately/cf7sbwo http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1x2t3j/all_visitors_...

gnur 13y ago

Instantly is a bit a overstatement. Whenever you connect to a public wifi hotspot and don't use some kind of tunnel (ssh/vpn) you run the risk of automatically downloading malware. Which isn't any different then any other place in the world. Whenever I connect to a public wifi hotspot I use a ssh tunnel, I wish them good luch injecting any malware in that stream.

stale 13y ago

"Proving yet again what a fabulous idea it was to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia..." I should have stopped reading right there :)

product50 13y ago

I have judged Marissa Mayer because of this article making into Yahoo Sports. Nothing has changed.

blueskin_ 13y ago

No detail. How were they 'hacked'? How did they notice?

eps 13y ago

You can tell it's going to be an excellent article when a flight to Sochi takes 75 hours.