14 DAY TRIAL // Kyle Wilhoit, the Trend Micro senior threat researcher who assisted NBC News with its controversial Sochi Olympics hacking experiment, has published a white paper with complete technical details.
After being criticized by the IT security community, NBC has made a statement to clarify some things. Still, many are displeased with the way the story has been edited.
In a blog post published on Friday, Wilhoit explained that the phones of those who visit Russia for the Olympics are not automatically hacked, unless they’re really careless when surfing the Web.
“Whether to execute ‘applications’ or to open a Microsoft Word document, all the attacks shown required user interaction in order to compromise the device,” the expert explained.
He has also clarified that the way the test devices had been compromised is not something specific to Russia. Such attacks could occur anywhere in the world, it all depends on what the user is doing.
Furthermore, Wilhoit says, “the infections occurred on newly unboxed hardware. Had basic security precautions such as updating the operating system or not opening emails from unrecognized sources been done, these attacks could have been prevented.”
You can check out the complete white paper on the Sochi Olympics hacking experiment on Trend Micro’s website.