Hackers shut out by World Cup security

Security around the computer system used in the recent World Cup tournament held up well enough to prevent any significant problems.

Avaya said Wednesday the network it designed recorded 5 million "unique firewall events" each day of the seven-week event, and while 128,000 breached the firewalls, there were no security-related or application outages recorded.

"From a security standpoint, we never lost bandwidth or network resources due to resource exhaustion," explained Dr. Tom Porter, Avaya's head of IT security for the Cup.

The World Cup system processed more than 21 trillion bytes of data, including everything from digital credentials to photo transmissions and voice traffic.

According to Avaya, between 70 and 80 viruses, malware and Trojans were plucked from the system every day by the Sentarus Network IDS system provided to Avaya by Demarc Security. Repeated attempts to hack into the network were blocked as well.

Common discoveries were MyDoom and Net-worm, which have been circulating in cyberspace for some time. Avaya said the worms got into the system via laptops that were already infected when they accessed the World Cup network and were detected and removed.