Yesterday (Feb 5 2014) On February 4th, NBC News ran a On February 4th, NBC News ran a story claiming that if you bring your mobile phone or laptop to the Sochi Olympics, it'll immediately be hacked the moment you turn it on. The story was fabricated. The technical details relate to going to the Olympics in cyberspace (visiting websites), not going to there in person and using their local WiFi.





The story shows Richard Engel "getting hacked" while in a cafe in Russia. It is wrong in every salient detail.

They aren't in Sochi, but in Moscow, 1007 miles away. The "hack" happens because of the websites they visit (Olympic themed websites), not their physical location. The results would've been the same in America. The phone didn't "get" hacked; Richard Engel initiated the download of a hostile Android app onto his phone. [update here] and he had to disable the security on the phone to do it

I had expected the story to be about the situation with WiFi in Sochi, such as man-in-the-middle attacks inserting the Blackhole toolkit into web pages exploiting the latest Flash 0day. But the story was nothing of the sort.





Instead, the hacking in the story was due to the hostility of Olympic themed websites. The only increased danger from being in Russia is geolocation. Google uses your IP address to increase the of rank local sites, so you'll see more dodgy Russian sites in the results. You can disable this feature in your Google account settings.





Absolutely 0% of the story was about turning on a computer and connecting to a Sochi network. 100% of the story was about visiting websites remotely. Thus, the claim of the story that you'll get hacked immediately upon turning on your computers is fraudulent. The only thing that can be confirmed by the story is "don't let Richard Engel borrow your phone".





That leaves us with the same advice that we always give people:

don't click on stuff patch your stuff (browser, Flash, PDF) get rid of the really bad stuff (Oracle's Java) don't click on stuff oh, and if you really are in Sochi, use VPN over the public WiFi

I gleaned these details from Kyle Wilhoit, the expert quoted in the story, and his Twitter feed . He's working on a blog with the full technical details. I'm sure it'll be great, with lots of details about what hackers can find with Maltego, the dangers of hostile websites, and so on -- the sort of great information totally lost in the nonsense that is the NBC story.







