SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — With the Summer Olympic Games less than five weeks away, officials in host nation France are grappling with a slew of threats and incidents that point in one direction: Russia.
Google has warned that “Russia poses the most severe threat to the Olympics,” voicing “high confidence” that hackers tied to Russia will conduct cyberattacks against the summer games.
Earlier this month, French police thwarted a suspected terrorist plot near Paris, arresting a 26-year-old man after a self-inflicted explosion rocked his hotel room near Charles de Gaulle Airport. The man – a Russian speaker from the Moscow-occupied Donbas region in eastern Ukraine – sustained severe burns, and investigators found bomb-making materials and, according to media reports, weapons and false passports in his hotel room. France’s Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the man for involvement in a terrorist conspiracy.
French police are also investigating a Russian connection to the placement of five coffins draped in French flags at the Eiffel Tower. The coffins were left at the Paris landmark on June 1, inscribed with “French soldiers in the Ukraine,” possibly referencing President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion that French troops might be sent to Ukraine. Three men, including a Bulgarian and a German national, were arrested in connection with the incident; France’s domestic intelligence agency, the DGSE, released a memo saying it believed that Russia’s top intelligence agency, the FSB, had orchestrated the placing of the coffins.
Officials also said one of the suspects may have been involved in the vandalism of Paris’ Holocaust memorial a week earlier, in which 35 red hands were painted on the monument that pays tribute to those who safeguarded Jews during the WWII Nazi occupation of France.
And last month, French police arrested an 18-year-old Chechen man suspected of planning a suicide bombing at the soccer stadium in Saint-Etienne.
Officials say two threads tie these disparate episodes together: Russia; and threats to the 2024 Olympics.
“(Russia) has been at war with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for years, so this is an opportune time to irritate and undermine them,” Casey Babb, a Fellow with the Royal United Services Institute in London, told The Cipher Brief. “Further, the Olympics are happening in France, a NATO country that has provided Ukraine with weapons and which is now sending fighter jets and training pilots. They’re a real target for Russia.”
“Sowing chaos”
In the runup to the Paris games, as geopolitical tensions deepen across the Middle East and Europe, France has been on its highest level of alert, following warnings of a resurgent Islamic State and a war in Gaza that many terrorism experts believe has inspired jihadists to strike Western targets. As The Cipher Brief has reported, those concerns have been heightened by the Paris organizers’ plans to present an open face to the public; on July 26, rather than the traditional march of athletes into an Olympic Stadium, the games will begin with a nearly four-mile procession along the Seine River, with athletes entering Paris on boats and hundreds of thousands of spectators watching from special viewing stands.
And now Russia is on the Paris threat radar, too, for a host of reasons.
As Babb noted, Russia has been barred from the Paris Olympics due to its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Kremlin is reported to be running a campaign to discredit the games and stoke fears of an attack.
“Russia thrives on sowing chaos, and so that’s what this is about,”Babb said.
David Fuhriman, a longtime Russia expert and former U.S. Army Operations Officer, told The Cipher Brief that Russia’s security service likely has an intelligence officer posted to France whose job is to identify infrastructure entities for sabotage activities.
“I believe there is some security threat from Russia to the 2024 Summer Paris Olympics,” Fuhriman said. “Paris, as one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, has many potential targets for Russian attacks.”
A Russian cyber threat
Beyond concerns of kinetic disruption, security specialists are also worried about Russia’s ability to disrupt on the cyber front.
Fuhriman believes Russia will use cyberattacks “to wreak havoc on the Paris Olympics,” noting that Russian hackers used a crippling computer virus labeled “Olympic Destroyer” that brought down the IT infrastructure during the 2018 Seoul Korea Winter Olympics.
Earlier this month, Google and Microsoft warned that the Games face a high chance of cyberattacks, and singled out hackers linked to Russia.
“Olympics-related cyber threats could realistically impact various targets including event organizers and sponsors, ticketing systems, Paris infrastructure, and athletes and spectators traveling to the event,” Google Cloud’s Mandiant cybersecurity team said. The team warned of attacks aimed at causing misinformation online, as well as chaos and disruption to the games themselves.
“Mandiant assesses with high confidence that Russia poses the most severe threat to the Olympics given its repeated targeting of previous Olympic games, its tense relationship with Europe, and recent pro-Russia information operations having already targeted France,” the cybersecurity firm said.
Microsoft said that Russia’s influence campaign against the Paris Olympics began last June, with the dissemination of a feature-length film entitled “Olympics Has Fallen,” using Tom Cruise-sounding AI-generated audio to smear the Olympics leadership. Microsoft said it had continued to observe “a network of Russia-affiliated actors pursuing a range of malign influence campaigns against France, the French President, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Paris Games.”
The influence operation is tied to the Russia-linked “Storm-1099,” also known by the codename “Doppelganger,” a sophisticated Russia-affiliated influence actor identified by Microsoft in late 2023. The campaign focuses on disinformation and fake or doctored content, and has utilized more than a dozen unique French-language “news” websites to warn of potential violence at the Olympics. Officials say the campaign is expected to amplify as the games draw closer.
Andrew Lewis, President of the global intelligence and geospatial solutions firm The Ulysses Group, told The Cipher Brief that cyberattacks against the Paris games, particularly Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attacks in which multiple devices overwhelm a website or server with traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users, are highly probable.
“These are low-risk and high-reward actions for Russia, particularly if they can impact transportation or derail an event,” Lewis asserted.
What happens now
How equipped is France to deal with the burgeoning Kremlin threat?
“Overall, I think the French are struggling to manage the situation,” Lewis said. He noted that recent intelligence failures have rocked the DGSE, and its longtime head, Bernard Émié, was replaced in December by Nicolas Lerner, an ally of President Emmanuel Macron.
He also pointed out that the DGSE had failed to anticipate the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and was stung by a series of military coups in West Africa where Russia “is now making significant advances in places like Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso.”
Other security experts are more optimistic.
“France has one of the world’s most sophisticated and well-oiled security establishments,” Babb said, “And with all eyes on Paris for the Olympics, I’d be surprised if they fell short of meeting any challenges or threats Russia may create. Further, France is not alone, so other NATO allies, including the U.S. and U.K., will be ready to assist.”
As The Cipher Brief reported last month, there will be no shortage of security preparations in Paris and other parts of the country. Some 45,000 police and military police officers are expected to deploy across the city and its suburbs, roughly 100 divers will be looking for bombs, and 650 officers from anti-terrorist units will be on duty,, along with more than 700 firefighters trained in detecting chemical attacks.Bertrand Cavallier, a consultant and a former commander at France’s national military police training school, told The Cipher Brief that “there will be a mobilization of all forces, not only in Paris or at the sites, but the entire French security system will increase in power, with the involvement of other actors such as the army, the air force, and others. It is really a level of mobilization that has never taken place in France.”
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