Discussing cybercrime ahead of London's 2012 Olympics 26 April 2012 A huge dependence on IT will mean that cyber security is as essential as physical security for the 2012 Olympic Games. Berenice Baker spoke to Denis Edgar-Nevill, chair of cybercrime forensics with the British Computer Society (BCS), about potential cyber threats to the Games and how the government is planning ahead. Berenice Baker: Do you feel like cybercrime is the poor cousin as far as security for the Olympic Game is concerned? Denis Edgar-Nevill: There are a number of political figures who have really raised the awareness of cyber security [before] the 2012 London Olympic Games, such as David Blunkett. To some extent cyber security is very well covered. Consider the Beijing Olympics in 2008, which was always going to be a target for cyber attacks by political demonstrators protesting about issues such as the annexation of Tibet. There were at the time something like 12 million security threats every day all the way through the Olympics, but very few of them caused any damage at all to the Olympic websites. The first real electronic attacks against the Games can be traced back to 1980, and although it's an increasing problem, the threat has been very well managed. Any direct threat would be in the form of distributed denial of service attacks, but I believe these issues are very well understood and I don't think there will be a capacity problem with the Olympic websites. BB: Aside from attacking Olympic