Alice Chambers |
Sporting events and entertainment venues are facing increasing cyberthreats, according to the fifth edition of Microsoft’s Cyber Signals report.
The report is based on security data gathered from 634.6 million events across 45 Qatari organisations during the FIFA World Cup between November and December 2022, and covers how threat actors assess and infiltrate these environments across venues, teams and critical infrastructure around the event itself.
Information from the sports market “is made increasingly vulnerable by the growing number of connected venues, and with the number of devices and interconnected networks in these environments, sports teams as well as major league and global sporting associations and attendees house a trove of valuable information desirable to cybercriminals,” said Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity and management at Microsoft, in a recent blog. “Venue IT systems and arenas contain hundreds of known and unknown vulnerabilities that allow threat actors to target critical business services such as point of sale, IT infrastructures, and visitor devices.”
According to Jakkal, venues must adopt robust protection measures to combat this such as deploying firewalls, strong encryption protocols like multifactor authentication and continuous monitoring of network traffic and potential threats in real time.