Google and NBC stage “War Games” to prepare for hacker attacks on Olympics online coverage

Photo: london2012.com.

The WSJ's Joel Schectman reports that NBC and Google are conducting “war games” in at least three countries, in preparation for possible hacker attacks or hardware screwups that could interrupt web streaming of the 2012 Summer Olympics Games in London, which begin this month.

The planned online streaming, if successful, will be the largest-ever online offering of a sports event.

For the past nine months the network’s online team, together with Google, which is managing the streaming of the games, have simulated hundreds of disruptive scenarios, some lasting eight hours. They have simulated a range of problems from broken broadcast encoders to traffic overloads and hacker assaults on the systems, NBC staff told CIO Journal.

“We have it very well-scripted, so we know that when a problem occurs who is on point and what steps we need to take,” said Eric Black, vice president of technology for NBC Sports and Olympics. “At some point during the games there’s likely to be an outage, but the goal is for us to be on top of that and have no end-user impact.”

Read more: NBC, Google, Stage “War Games” To Prepare for London Olympic Disruptions.

• [Michael Johnson]

  And never once was there a story about criminals/bad guys/etc COUNTING on you following the rules of engagement (the “script”). nope.. not once has it ever happened.

• [B E Pratt]

  I so totally want that hat!!

• [AnomicOfficeDrone]

  The only thing that has ever made me miss summer reruns is coverage of the Olympics.

• [mtdna]

  Look – it’s John Oliver’s dad!!

• [simonbarsinister]

  It makes me wonder how long it is before our corporate overlords have their congress make it an act of war to ‘attack’ a corporations assets or profit?