From Inside the Games

There have been no attempts to hack the systems of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), the Moscow-based organisation revealed today.

It will raise suspicions that cyber espionage groups with links to Vladimir Putin’s Government were behind a campaign to get information from 16 international anti-doping agencies.

Microsoft had revealed in a blog post yesterday from Tom Burt, its corporate vice-president of customer security and trust, that they had detected attacks beginning on September 16 to hack the computers of the foreign agencies.

The attacks started shortly before reports emerged that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) suspected Russia had tampered with evidence they had handed over in January from the Moscow Laboratory.

Burt identified Fancy Bear, also known as APT28 or Strontium, as the culprit.

“There were no serious cyberattacks,” RUSADA’s deputy director-general Margarita Pakhnotskaya told Russia’s official state news agency TASS.

“But from time to time, as our information security specialist informed, some attacks are being carried out on our server.

“But at us everything is reliably protected, all security systems are updated.

“In general, we did not suffer in any way.”

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