World Anti-Doping Agency hackers announce revived attacks

The organization behind a hack of the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) during the this year’s Olympics in Brazil has announced it will resume attacks on the organization. 

On Monday morning, the group identifying itself as “Anonymous Poland” tweeted its intentions to resume attacks first to a reporter at The Hill, then to reporters at Vocative, Softpedia and databreaches.net.

{mosads}”@JoeUchill within a few days will be new attack on the WADA/Olimpic,” read the tweet directed to The Hill.

WADA oversees drug testing for the Olympics.

The original attacks took place on Aug. 11. Though the group’s Twitter profile identifies the hackers as an Anonymous affiliate in Poland, the choice of target immediately drew suspicions to Russia.

After Russian track and field athlete Yuliya Stepanova came forward with allegations of state-sponsored doping, WADA called for a ban on all Russian competitors at the Olympic games. The International Olympic Committee eventually softened the punishment, but left a large portion of the Russian delegation barred from competition. 

WADA’s website gives each athlete a private account on its Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS), which among other things keeps track of the location of athletes for continued drug testing.

Stepanova has allegedly been in hiding outside of Russia since coming forward, meaning the ADAMS system may have been one of only a few methods of locating her. WADA announced Stepanova’s account was the only athlete account accessed by a third party as part of the attack. 

Researchers at ThreatConnect noted that spearphishing websites used in the attacks had domain names registered at ITItch.com – a bitcoin-accepting service sometimes used by the attackers behind recent hacks at the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

Though ITItch is an obscure company, it is a publicly available service, meaning it is only a circumstantial forensic link between the two sets of attacks.