From small businesses to large corporations, no company is immune to cyberattacks.
High-profile sports teams such as the Vancouver Canucks are prime targets given their assets and the nature of their business, given they can’t simply close their doors if they experience an attack, said Fortinet vice-president of Western Canada sales Gordon Phillips.
“The puck drops at 7 p.m. regardless,” he said. “We have to make sure we’re available. They can’t afford downtime.”
Last week, the California-based cybersecurity company with an office in Burnaby announced a new partnership with the ice-hockey team for the 2024-25 season.
The Fortinet release stated Canucks Sports and Entertainment (CSE) chose the company’s “security fabric” to simplify detection of and response to cyberattacks.
CSE is the parent company of the Canucks and also owns and operates the Abbotsford Canucks, the Vancouver Warriors and the eSports team Vancouver Surge.
The company’s security fabric works like a mesh that brings together detection and automated threat response in a single operating system, FortiOS, to make protection easier.
“It provides a single pane of glass for managing that environment,” he said.
As opposed to managing various tools, this operating system will allow the organization to manage their environment, customer assets, analytics and respond with more efficiency all in one place.
Fortinet’s services are now being used at the CSE physical central data centre and will help secure Rogers Arena, the Canucks, their training camp facilities and other affiliates.
Growing threat of ransomware and AI
Perhaps one of the biggest cyberthreats that sports and entertainment companies like CSE must face is ransomware attacks, with many B.C. customer-facing and retail organizations experiencing high-profile breaches in the last year, said Phillips.
Weaponized artificial intelligence and the capability of tailored threats also pose a particularly challenging situation for high-profile entities.
“It really boiled down to availability and making sure everything was up all the time,” added Phillips. “So that if something does happen to get by one piece of the technology, there's another layer or safety net to prevent them from going any further.”
This large data centre is extremely well protected and holds a lot of information assets, explained Phillips.
Part of the security fabric will also include installing a central FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall cluster at the Canucks data centre to control network traffic.
Besides choosing Fortinet for their expertise, their firewalls have a fast throughput that doesn’t introduce any lag to the environment—something that is quite important for their eSports team.
Building a secure software-defined wide-area-network is also in the works. This technology would create a safe internal network that connects an organization's branches together.
Challenges in the sports industry
Hackers will typically try multiple ways to get into the database of a large sports organization. No one point of entry is particularly weak, but having a significant number of external partners with access to that network could create vulnerabilities.
“The ticket-checking system is a different system from the POS [point of sale] system in all the restaurants and fast food, but all those are connected to external vendors,” said Phillips. “So you need an environment that is accessible but very, very secure.”
Cyberattacks have and will continue to become more frequent and complex, with Phillips noting hackers have become more “patient.”
“They're not just jumping in, grabbing an asset, jumping out,” he said. “They're sitting on the network for weeks and months to see how much damage they can do.”
Hackers know they can leverage more money going after a brand or customer-facing organizations because it would be publicly embarrassing and damaging to suffer one.
Phillips said retailers and large brands have a lot of ground to cover, adding that Fortinet is automating detection and response to reduce their workloads.
Fortinet’s 510,000-square-foot Burnaby grounds have three buildings and 1,800 employees—20 per cent of its global workforce.
—With files from Lauren Vanderdeen
