Tour de France cycling outfit Team Sky claims that hackers may have infiltrated its systems, stealing insider data on previous winner Chris Froome in a bid to find evidence of doping.
Team principal David Brailsford made the remarks during a press conference when asked whether he thought questions of the 30-year-old Brit using performance enhancing drugs would be asked again.
“It’s part of the game, isn’t it? If he does well, the rest of the Tour it’s ‘How do you know he’s not doping?,’ he said, according to The Guardian.
“The question of how to prove a negative is always going to be a difficult one. We think someone has hacked into our training data and got Chris’s files, so we’ve got some legal guys on the case there… If you are going to accuse someone of doping, then don’t cheat.”
Froome has argued in the past – when confronted with similar accusations following his stunning 2013 Tour win – that those interpreting ‘power’ data without context are “clowns.”
Bryan Lillie, head of cybersecurity at defense contractor QinetiQ, argued that any organization with valuable data is a target for hackers today.
“Anyone can be hacked, it’s not just banks and governments, and we all need to treat security seriously,” he added.
“IoT, which includes including many devices that monitor and collect personal information, creates huge amounts of valuable data which represents a new target for hackers, blackmailers, competitors and critics. The more that data becomes critical to your operation, the more seriously you need to take it.”
In fact, security and privacy are two of the biggest security challenges to IoT applications, according to developers interviewed for a Harbor Research poll released in June.
Worryingly, half of respondents to that survey claimed they “don’t have” or are “unsure” if they have the right technology, skills or resources to hand to deliver on expectations.