Is NBC’s Sochi Cybersecurity Scare Complete B.S.?

While other outlets address
serious issues surrounding the Olympics, like the
mistreatment of gays, questionably-sound
infrastructure, and the threats of
terrorist attacks, NBC decided to spice things up and bring a
bogeyman to the games: hackers. In a newscast last week, the
network insinuated that phones and computers are immediately
susceptible to dangerous Russian hackers upon connecting to Wi-Fi
in Sochi. One internet security expert
describes NBC’s presentation as “100 percent fraudulent,” and
believes the reporter “hacked himself by knowingly downloading a
hostile Android app.”

On Tuesday, NBC aired “Hacked
Within Minutes: Sochi Visitors Face Internet Minefield,” featuring
Brian Williams and chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel.
Williams opened with a grave warning that “visitors to Russia can
expect to be hacked,” and that “it’s not a matter of if
but when.”

Engel presented a newly opened smartphone “to browse for
information about the Sochi Olympics” in a dimly lit Russian cafe.
He connected to the internet and asserted that “almost immediately
we were hacked” and attacked by malware.

Errata Security CEO Robert Graham
says the report is “nonsense” and that “absolutely zero
percent of the story was about turning on a computer and connecting
to a Sochi network.” He lists three glaring problems with NBC’s
presentation:

1. They aren’t in Sochi, but in Moscow, 1007 miles away.

2. 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.

3. The phone didn’t “get” hacked; Richard Engel initiated the
download of a hostile Android app onto his phone… and he had to
disable the security on the phone to do it.

Graham then tried to replicate Engel’s experiment. After going
to
great lengths, he writes, “I gave up and cheated —
cheating the same way I’m sure Richard Engel cheated. Instead of
looking just for Sochi, I went looking for the viruses
themselves.”

An NBC representative
responded by charging, “The claims made [by Graham] are
completely without merit.” According to CNET, instead of focusing
on the actual hacking claims, the representative “noted that the
report made it clear from the beginning that the taping was done in
Moscow.” Judge for yourself how obvious that was in the broadcast.

This kind of sensationalist reporting not only
calls into question NBC’s credibility, it is outright
counterproductive for technology freedom. As The Verge

notes, deliberately muddling the distinction between the
supposed threats posed by hackers and the
real ones posed by massive government surveillance systems “is
one of the things that allows that very system to be set up.”