French authorities have detected and foiled 68 cyberattacks linked to the Olympic Games since 22 July, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has said.
Two of the attacks were directed at Olympic sites at Bercy and La Villette in the French capital last Thursday, Attal told reporters on Wednesday.
“All these 68 cyberattacks, including the two cyberattacks that targeted Olympic sites, were detected in time and foiled,” Attal said, though he gave no details on the nature of the other attacks.
Attal has resigned as PM but has stayed on as head of the caretaker government, on President Emmanuel Macron’s request, while Paris hosts the Games.
This year, the French National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI) said it had been training all the various entities involved in protecting against cyberattacks in anticipation of an increase in such attempts during the Paris Olympics.
The Games opened last Friday amid tight security.
Just ahead of the Games, French authorities launched a major operation to clean up computers infected by a cyber-espionage programme that has struck millions of users worldwide.
Organisers of the previous Olympics, held in Tokyo, reported 450 million cyber attacks, most of which were attempts at paralysing IT networks by saturating them with connexions.
The head of technology for Paris 2024 said he anticipated “eight to ten times more” cyber attacks than Japan had experienced.
