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Hack rush team 2 20161/12/2024 If they couldn't recover the servers by the next morning, the entire IT backend of the organizing committee-responsible for everything from meals to hotel reservations to event ticketing-would remain offline as the actual games got underway. The result would be a humiliating confusion. Oh knew that in just over two hours the opening ceremony would end, and tens of thousands of athletes, visiting dignitaries, and spectators would find that they had no Wi-Fi connections and no access to the Olympics app, full of schedules, hotel information, and maps. They jumped into a Hyundai SUV and began the 45-minute drive east, down through the mountains to the coastal city of Gangneung, where the Olympics' technology operations center was located.įrom the car, Oh called staffers at the stadium and told them to start distributing Wi-Fi hot spots to reporters and to tell security to check badges manually, because all RFID systems were down. Once Oh had made his way through the crowd, he ran to the stadium's exit, out into the cold night air, and across the parking lot, now joined by two other IT staffers. “It's actually happened,” Oh thought, as if to shake himself out of the sense that it was all a bad dream. But now that one of those nightmare scenarios was playing out in reality, the feeling, for Oh, was both infuriating and surreal. They'd conducted drills as early as the summer of the previous year, simulating disasters like cyberattacks, fires, and earthquakes. The Pyeongchang organizing committee had prepared for this: Its cybersecurity advisory group had met 20 times since 2015. The Olympics' official app, including its digital ticketing function, was broken too when it reached out for data from backend servers, they suddenly had none to offer. Every RFID-based security gate leading into every Olympic building was down. Thousands of internet-linked TVs showing the ceremony around the stadium and in 12 other Olympic facilities had gone black. Oh's response had been annoyance: Even now, with the entire world watching, the company was still working out its bugs?Īs Oh made his way out of the press section toward the exit, reporters around him had already begun complaining that the Wi-Fi seemed to have suddenly stopped working. The contractor's glitches had been a long-term headache. The source of that problem was a contractor, an IT firm from which the Olympics were renting another hundred servers. Half an hour earlier, he'd gotten word about a nagging technical issue. That immense collection of machines seemed to be functioning perfectly-almost. He'd overseen the setup of an IT infrastructure for the games comprising more than 10,000 PCs, more than 20,000 mobile devices, 6,300 Wi-Fi routers, and 300 servers in two Seoul data centers. For more than three years, the 47-year-old civil servant had been director of technology for the Pyeongchang Olympics organizing committee. Few felt that anticipation more intensely than Oh. The 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony was about to start.Īs the lights darkened around the roofless structure, anticipation buzzed through the 35,000-person crowd, the glow of their phone screens floating like fireflies around the stadium. He wore a gray and red official Olympics jacket that kept him warm despite the near-freezing weather, and his seat, behind the press section, had a clear view of the raised, circular stage a few hundred feet in front of him. Just before 8 pm on February 9, 2018, high in the northeastern mountains of South Korea, Sang-jin Oh was sitting on a plastic chair a few dozen rows up from the floor of Pyeongchang's vast, pentagonal Olympic Stadium.
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