Manage IT Security for the London Olympic 2012 games Essay

Manage IT Security for the London Olympic 2012 games - Essay Example A safety and security strategy and security measures have been set up to respond to these. According to BBC News (2011), 13,500 armed forces personnel and 10,000 police officers will be deployed during the Olympics to enforce security. This will be backed by 50 marine officers in fast response boats who will be joined by 100 military personnel (Seida 2012). The structure of the safety and security strategy has been built around strategic objectives and each of these be will be delivered though a special programme headed by a programme manager. The Protect Programme will ensure the safety and security of games sites, infrastructure and venues, and people involved in the Games. The Programme will also consider protecting people travelling to the Games. The Prepare Programme will provide specialist response by ensuring that the necessary contingencies and workforce are in place to manage events that could significantly compromise or disrupt the security of the Games. The Identify and Di srupt Programme will provide the required capacity and capability to identify and disrupt all forms of threats to the Games. Command, Control, Plan and Resource (C2PR) programmes will ensure that required resources are available and can be deployed to the necessary sites to provide safety and security (Home Office 2012). One of the assumptions for this strategy is that the greatest security threat will be terrorism. Despite the above security, the potential IT security vulnerabilities of the event are still high and the major threat is identity theft. Vacca (2003) defines this as a type of crime where someone steals the identity of someone else and poses as that person. This is basically an identify fraud. In true-name ID fraud, the person’s identify information is not modified. Terrorists are also likely to stealing key pieces information from people like driver’s license numbers and social security numbers and combine them with fake information to create new identiti es which they will use to gain entry into the games venues. This is called synthetic ID fraud as noted by McFadden (2010). Criminals could pose as fans, players, visitors and even London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) officials. Once they gain entry into the venues, they commit terrorist attacks. They can also use these IDs to obtain goods and services. ID theft is a form of cyber crime. Giles (2010) explains that hackers access personal information of other people online. To get this information, the terrorists could send messages posing as the official website for LOCOG, trying to sell tickets. As people respond, they get their personal details and use them to make fake IDs. ID theft could also result from phishing attacks like man-in-the-middle phishing. This is where a criminal positions themselves between the legitimate site and the user (Emigh and Labs 2005). In this way, they will save valuable information from different sources and send false messages bet ween LOCOG and its users. To detect this, LOCOG will have to setup a spoof-reporting email address that users will send mails to. This will provide