TOKYO: About 450 million cyberattacks hit the official homepage of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics organizing committee, Games-related network systems and others during the sporting events this year, committee officials said Thursday.

The number more than doubled from some 200 million cyberattacks that reportedly hit the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics. But the operations of the Tokyo Games, which took place between July and September, were not affected, the committee said.

For a month from early July, a massive amount of authentication errors was reported. They stemmed apparently from password-spraying attacks, in which offenders use the same password for multiple IDs to gain illegal accesses to systems.

The committee detected many such accesses to its official homepage and blocked them.

The officials said that the committee managed to prevent hackers from entering systems thanks to cybersecurity measures taken from early on.

The measures were implemented mainly by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., which contracted to manage communications services for the Tokyo Games.

NTT hopes to make use of the knowledge it obtained through the Tokyo Games for the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, western Japan, and other events.

JIJI Press