London Olympics IT team prepares for cyber and physical attacks

London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton on Monday officially launched the technology hub set to play a key role at the Olympics next year and revealed the exhaustive measures put in place to safeguard the infrastructure from attack or systems failure.

The Technology Operations Centre (TOC) for the London Olympics contains 180 servers that will be maintained by 450 professionals over the 16 days of the Olympics games and the 12 days of the Paralympics.

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) said it had been working closely with IT integrator Atos to ensure results can be delivered in real-time to all devices connected to the internet during the Olympics.

"We estimate there will be around nine million devices connected to the internet in 2012, and we need to ensure they can all access data in a reliable and secure way in an open environment," said Atos head of Olympics and major events, Patrick Adiba.

All of the 94 Olympic venues will have an in-house technology team and the TOC will oversee each team and deal with high severity issues, according to Adiba.

Locog chief information officer, Gerry Pennell, said the same software architecture used by Atos in previous Olympics games would be used in London 2012, but that it had been enhanced slightly.

For example, he said his team had added a Commentator Information System (CIS), which will provide commentators and journalists with their own touch-screen results system.

Pennell said the TOC team is still testing all the software to ensure it runs smoothly during the games.

"We know things are performing as expected but that doesn't mean we are done. There's still a lot of testing that needs to be done in the next 10 months," he added.

However, given the huge demand for information on events at the games, he couldn't guarantee that there would be no connection issues or downtime on some occasions.

"But for the vast majority of people, I think the experience will be pretty good," he said.

As part of securing the system, the TOC will hold "technology rehearsals" where different scenarios will be simulated that may cause problems with the IT systems.

Some of these scenarios would be cyber security related while others would be physical attacks, Pennell said.

"We will unplug cables and switch boxes off to make sure the resilience and automatic back-up kicks in and to see how the TOC reacts under pressure," he explained.

Pennell said he could not give much detail on how the IT architecture would be secured as this may increase risk to the system. However, he did say his team had worked hard to keep all "mission-critical components" separated from the web.

Also, denial-of-service attacks on the system are expected to be minimised because of the distributed nature of the system.

"We are mostly pushing data out," said Pennell. "We have a content distribution system, which makes it difficult to launch a denial-of-service attack against because the front end is so dispersed."

The press attending the event were asked to not disclose the exact location of the Canary Wharf building that is housing the Technology Operations Centre for security reasons. Pennell also said a back-up building with an alternative TOC is in place, in the event of a disaster.

If a terrorist incident occurs where the police shut down cellular networks, the TOC will use a fixed phone line service and satellite phones to communicate, Pennell said.

Pennell said Locog had held meetings with the Beijing Olympics organising committee to discuss security and web-based attacks they had experienced. 

Locog works with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as well as the UK government and the Mayor of London, to make sure the infrastructure for hosting the games is delivered on target and meets Olympic games' requirements.