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The Paris Olympics’ One Sure Thing: Cyberattacks

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In his office on one of the upper floors of the headquarters of the Paris Olympic organizing committee, Franz Regul has no doubt what is coming.

“We will be attacked,” said Mr. Regul, who leads the team responsible for warding off cyberthreats against this year’s Summer Games in Paris.

Companies and governments around the world now all have teams like Mr. Regul’s that operate in spartan rooms equipped with banks of computer servers and screens with indicator lights that warn of incoming hacking attacks. In the Paris operations center, there is even a red light to alert the staff to the most severe danger.

So far, Mr. Regul said, there have been no serious disruptions. But as the months until the Olympics tick down to weeks and then days and hours, he knows the number of hacking attempts and the level of risk will rise exponentially. Unlike companies and governments, though, who plan for the possibility of an attack, Mr. Regul said he knew exactly when to expect the worst.

“Not many organizations can tell you they will be attacked in July and August,” he said.

Worries over security at major events like the Olympics have usually focused on physical threats, like terrorist attacks. But as technology plays a growing role in the Games rollout, Olympic organizers increasingly view cyberattacks as a more constant danger.

The threats are manifold. Experts say hacking groups and countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran now have sophisticated operations capable of disabling not just computer and Wi-Fi networks but also digital ticketing systems, credential scanners and even the timing systems for events.

Fears about hacking attacks are not just hypothetical. At the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, a successful attack nearly derailed the Games before they could begin.

That cyberattack started on a frigid night as fans arrived for the opening ceremony. Signs that something was amiss came all at once. The Wi-Fi network, an essential tool to transmit photographs and news coverage, suddenly went down. Simultaneously, the official Olympics smartphone app — the one that held fans’ tickets and essential transport information — stopped functioning, preventing some fans from entering the stadium. Broadcast drones were grounded and internet-linked televisions meant to show images of the ceremony across venues went blank.

But the ceremony went ahead, and so did the Games. Dozens of cybersecurity officials worked through the night to repel the attack and to fix the glitches, and by the next morning there was little sign that a catastrophe had been averted when the first events got underway.

Since then, the threat to the Olympics has only grown. The cybersecurity team at the last Summer Games, in Tokyo in 2021, reported that it faced 450 million attempted “security events.” Paris expects to face eight to 12 times that number, Mr. Regul said.

Perhaps to demonstrate the scale of the threat, Paris 2024 cybersecurity officials use military terminology freely. They describe “war games” meant to test specialists and systems, and refer to feedback from “veterans of Korea” that has been integrated into their evolving defenses.

Experts say a variety of actors are behind most cyberattacks, including criminals trying to hold data in exchange for a lucrative ransom and protesters who want to highlight a specific cause. But most experts agree that only nation states have the ability to carry out the biggest attacks.

The 2018 attack in Pyeongchang was initially blamed on North Korea, South Korea’s antagonistic neighbor. But experts, including agencies in the U.S. and Britain, later concluded that the true culprit — now widely accepted to be Russia — deliberately used techniques designed to pin the blame on someone else.

This year, Russia is once again the biggest focus.

Russia’s team has been barred from the Olympics following the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, although a small group of individual Russians will be permitted to compete as neutral athletes. France’s relationship with Russia has soured so much that President Emmanuel Macron recently accused Moscow of attempting to undermine the Olympics through a disinformation campaign.

The International Olympic Committee has also pointed the finger at attempts by Russian groups to damage the Games. In November, the I.O.C. issued an unusual statement saying it had been targeted by defamatory “fake news posts” after a documentary featuring an A.I.-generated voice-over purporting to be the actor Tom Cruise appeared on YouTube.

Later, a separate post on Telegram — the encrypted messaging and content platform — mimicked a fake news item broadcast by the French network Canal Plus and aired false information that the I.O.C. was planning to bar Israeli and Palestinian teams from the Paris Olympics.

Earlier this year, Russian pranksters — impersonating a senior African official — managed to get Thomas Bach, the I.O.C. president, on the phone. The call was recorded and released earlier this month. Russia seized on Mr. Bach’s remarks to accuse Olympic officials of engaging in a “conspiracy” to keep its team out of the Games.

In 2019, according to Microsoft, Russian state hackers attacked the computer networks of at least 16 national and international sports and antidoping organizations, including the World Anti-Doping Agency, which at the time was poised to announce punishments against Russia related to its state-backed doping program.

Three years earlier, Russia had targeted antidoping officials at the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics. According to indictments of several Russian military intelligence officers filed by the United States Department of Justice, operatives in that incident spoofed hotel Wi-Fi networks used by antidoping officials in Brazil to successfully penetrate their organization’s email networks and databases.

Ciaran Martin, who served as the first chief executive of Britain’s national cybersecurity center, said Russia’s past behavior made it “the most obvious disruptive threat” at the Paris Games. He said areas that might be targeted included event scheduling, public broadcasts and ticketing systems.

“Imagine if all athletes are there on time, but the system scanning iPhones at the gate has gone down,” said Mr. Martin, who is now a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.

“Do you go through with a half-empty stadium, or do we delay?” he added. “Even being put in that position where you either have to delay it or have world-class athletes in the biggest event of their lives performing in front of a half-empty stadium — that’s absolutely a failure.”

Mr. Regul, the Paris cybersecurity head, declined to speculate about any specific nation that might target this summer’s Games. But he said organizers were preparing to counter methods specific to countries that represent a “strong cyberthreat.”

This year, Paris organizers have been conducting what they called “war games” in conjunction with the I.O.C. and partners like Atos, the Games’ official technology partner, to prepare for attacks. In those exercises, so-called ethical hackers are hired to attack systems in place for the Games, and “bug bounties” are offered to those who discover vulnerabilities.

Hackers have previously targeted sports organizations with malicious emails, fictional personas, stolen passwords and malware. Since last year, new hires at the Paris organizing committee have undergone training to spot phishing scams.

“Not everyone is good,” Mr. Regul said.

In at least one case, a Games staff member paid an invoice to an account after receiving an email impersonating another committee official. Cybersecurity staff members also discovered an email account that had attempted to impersonate the one assigned to the Paris 2024 chief, Tony Estanguet.

Millions more attempts are coming. Cyberattacks have typically been “weapons of mass irritation rather than weapons of mass destruction,” said Mr. Martin, the former British cybersecurity official.

“At their worst,” he said, “they’ve been weapons of mass disruption.”



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Why TikTok Users Are Blocking Celebrities

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As protests over the war in Gaza unfolded blocks away, last week’s Met Gala was largely devoid of political statements on the red carpet. That the organizers of fashion’s most powerful annual spectacle (one for which tickets cost $75,000 this year) achieved this proved surprising to many observers. Less than two weeks later, though, a fast-growing online protest movement is taking shape. At least, it is on TikTok, the social media platform that was a sponsor of the Met event.

Blockout 2024, also referred to as Operation Blockout or Celebrity Block Party, targets high-profile figures who participants feel are not using their profiles and platforms to speak out about the Israel-Hamas war and wider humanitarian crises. Here’s what has happened so far, what supporters hope to achieve and why it all began.

The criticism began on May 6, when Haley Kalil (@haleyybaylee on social media), an influencer who was a host on E! News before the event, posted a TikTok video of herself wearing a lavish 18th-century-style floral gown and headdress with audio from Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette,” in which Kirsten Dunst proclaims, “Let them eat cake!”

The clip (for which Ms. Kalil later apologized and which was deleted) was viewed widely. Given the current global conflicts and humanitarian crises, critics described it as “tone deaf.” Then posts emerged comparing ostentatious costumes worn by celebrities on the Met red carpet to scenes from “The Hunger Games,” in which affluent citizens in opulent outfits wine and dine while watching the suffering of the impoverished districts for sport.

Images of Zendaya, a Met Gala co-chair, spliced with photographs of Palestinian children, incited the online masses. A rallying cry soon came from @ladyfromtheoutside, a TikTok creator who found inspiration in Ms. Kalil’s parroting of Marie Antoinette.

“It’s time for the people to conduct what I want to call a digital guillotine — a ‘digitine,’ if you will,” she said in a May 8 video post with two million views. “It’s time to block all the celebrities, influencers and wealthy socialites who are not using their resources to help those in dire need. We gave them their platforms. It’s time to take it back, take our views away, our likes, our comments, our money.”

“Block lists” of celebrities thought to be deserving of being blocked were published and widely shared online.

The movement is made up of pro-Palestinian supporters who have been assessing the actions and words of A-listers in order to decide if they have adequately responded to the conflict. If they have said nothing or not enough, the movement calls for those supporting Gaza to block that celebrity on social media. What constitutes sufficient action by the famous person — be it calls for a cease-fire, donations to aid charities or statements — appears unclear and can vary from celebrity to celebrity.

“Blockout” supporters argue that blocking is important because brands look at data on the followers and engagement of influencers and celebrities on social media before choosing whether to work with them to promote a product. Blocking someone on social media means you no longer see any posts from the person’s accounts, and it gives the blocker more control over who has access to their own updates and personal information. It can have more impact than unfollowing a celebrity account because many product deals thrive on targeted ads and views that can accumulate even if a user simply sees a post, without liking or sharing it.

If enough people block a content creator, it could reduce the creator’s ability to make money. Also, adherents of this thinking say, why follow someone whose values don’t align with yours?

Attendees with huge followings, like Zendaya, Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, have been at the top of the chopping blocks. But so have celebrities who didn’t attend the gala this year, including Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez.

Vogue, which according to Puck News published 570 Met Gala stories on its platforms and recorded more than a billion video views of content from the night, has also been targeted because of its ties to the event.

“The Met Gala is by far and away Vogue’s biggest cash cow,” Elaina Bell, a former Vogue employee, said in a TikTok post with 850,000 views. She explained that the event sold sponsorships “based on the data of past events,” adding, “How the Met Gala is seen is so important to the bottom line of Vogue specifically but also to Condé Nast.”

It certainly raised some eyebrows. The dress code was “The Garden of Time,” inspired by the J.G. Ballard short story of the same name. It’s an allegorical tale about an aristocratic couple isolated in their estate of fading beauty harassed by an enormous crowd preparing to overrun and destroy the space. Rather on the nose.

Yes. Some posts say the blockout is a negative example of “cancel culture.” Others suggest that, like other social media-led movements, it is digital posturing that generates little meaningful change.

Some argue that celebrities do not have a duty (or the awareness) to speak out on complicated geopolitical issues, and they question why it matters what famous people think about those issues, anyway. Others feel the movement has blurred parameters, given that some A-listers, like Jennifer Lopez and Billie Eilish, have previously shown support for a cease-fire in Gaza but are being punished for not speaking up now.

Several stars on the widely circulated block lists, including Lizzo and the influencer Chris Olsen, posted their first public videos asking followers to donate in support of aid organizations serving Palestinians. Blockout supporters have also worked to “boost” celebrities who have recently spoken about the conflict, like Macklemore, Dua Lipa and The Weeknd.

According to metrics from the analytics company Social Blade, many names on block lists have lost tens or hundreds of thousand of followers per day since the “digitine” began. But murky claims that stars like Kim Kardashian have lost millions of followers are unsubstantiated.

Will more A-listers start speaking out on the red carpet as a result of the lists? It is too soon to tell. But for frequent users of TikTok, the brand aura of the Met Gala is being profoundly altered. And while social-media-led boycotts are by no means unprecedented, this latest movement is a clear example of the growing power of creators to redistribute or even weaponize ​platforms that are cornerstones of a modern celebrity-centric — and capitalist — system.





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Grand Theft Auto maker firms up GTA 6 release date

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The latest instalment of the hugely popular series will be released in autumn 2025, its publisher says.



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OpenAI’s Flirty New Assistant, Google Guts the Web and We Play HatGPT



This week, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o, its newest A.I. model. It has an uncannily emotive voice that everybody is talking about. Then, we break down the biggest announcements from Google IO, including the launch of A.I. overviews, a major change to search that threatens the way the entire web functions. And finally, Kevin and Casey discuss the weirdest headlines from the week in another round of HatGPT.

Additional Reading:

“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. The show is edited by Jen Poyant. Engineering by Isaac Jones and original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop and Rowan Niemisto. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love.

Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti and Jeffrey Miranda.



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