Microsoft Reveals Elevated Cyber ​​Risk to Sports and Entertainment Industries – Technology Record

Alice Chambers | August 07, 2023

According to the fifth edition of Microsoft’s Cyber ​​Signals report, sporting events and entertainment venues are facing increasing cyber threats.

The report is based on security data collected across 634.6 million events at 45 Qatari organizations during the FIFA World Cup between November and December 2022 and details how threat actors are assessing these environments across venues, teams and critical infrastructure surrounding the event itself and infiltrate.

Information from the sports market “is becoming increasingly vulnerable with the growing number of connected venues, and with the number of devices and connected networks in these environments, sports teams as well as major sports leagues and global sports federations and participants have a wealth of valuable information at their disposal.” 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 infrastructure and visitor devices.”

According to Jakkal, venues need to implement robust protective measures to counter this, such as: B. the use of firewalls, strong encryption protocols such as multi-factor authentication and continuous real-time monitoring of network traffic and potential threats.