The website for the London 2012 Olympics & Paralympics was attacked 212 million times during the course of the events, BT Security has revealed.
Speaking at RSA Conference Europe 2013, BT Security CTO Mark Hughes explained that the extent of the attacks were part and parcel of creating the most connected Olympic Games ever.
He said: "The website experienced 212 million malicious attacks, which is certainly a lot. It was a high profile website that attracted a high volume of visitors. The site received 39.6 billion visits, so it was inevitable that with all those hits some of the traffic was going to be unwanted.
"Out of all of these attacks, though, only 77 were ticketed, meaning that a human being actually had to examine and deal with them. We were prepared. Obviously, if we’d had 212 million ticketed attacks that would have been a real problem for us but we were as ready as we could be. The fact that there were so many malicious attacks and we defended against them all successfully shows that what we did worked."
The connectivity of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games smashed a number of records.
The event website received four times as many visits as the Beijing Games website in 2008. There were also more tweets on one day than during the whole of the Beijing Games.
Traffic reached an all-time high on BT’s UK retail broadband network during the Olympics on July 29 when the UK woke up to the Games online and Team GB won the first of its 65 medals. Daily video traffic also increased on average by 19% compared to normal, with Bradley Wiggins winning gold in the cycling time trial being the peak.
