The computers running London's 2012 Olympic Games are to be subject to simulated cyber attacks, the BBC have reported.
A series of worst-case scenarios are to be played out in March and May next year, including a massive denial of service attack on the official website, and a virus getting onto organisers' computers.
A control centre, where operations will be co-ordinated from, has been opened in Canary Wharf.
Its permanent staff of 180 workers are already doing dry runs of sporting events, as they try to identify and fix problems.
But one of the biggest fears around the Olympics is a deliberate attack by cyber criminals. During the period of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China was subject to about 12 million online attacks per day.
Security testing on the system will be carried out in a specially isolated version of the Olympic network, using an in-house team of pretend hackers.
Patrick Adiba from Atos, the company managing the games' IT systems said: "We simulate past competitions and we have a shadow team of about 100 people coming and creating problems - injecting viruses, disconnecting PC servers."
"We are using a simulation system so it doesn't really matter if we corrupt the data. We simulate the effect and see how people react."
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