Understanding the Russian Cyber Threat to the 2026 Winter Olympics

The report assesses elevated cyber risk to the 2026 Milan‑Cortina Winter Olympics driven by geopolitical tensions and Russia’s exclusion from the Games, citing historical Russian-linked operations (e.g., Fancy Bear, Sandworm, AI-enabled disinformation) and forecasting high-impact scenarios including destructive OT malware against venue infrastructure, V2X/smart‑road manipulation, AI‑amplified deepfakes and strategic hack‑and‑leak operations; it recommends defenders adopt zero‑trust visibility, micro‑segmentation, anomaly detection for IoT, strict telemetry verification and content provenance controls to increase resilience.