Cybersecurity is one additional topic that the architects of the 2012 London Olympics had to take into consideration, now that hackers are getting more and more creativity–and increasingly aggressive–with their attacks.

The Olympic Games will attract a lot of eyeballs, but hackers have already started exploiting this international interest last month.  Spammers jumped on the opportunity and as of late June a huge upsurge in Olympics related spam messages swept through mailboxes everywhere. A note was even released on the official site warning users of some of the more popular hoaxes they might encounter: over two dozen variations including so-called lotteries, ‘personal’ e-mails from supposed staff and even messages offering free trips from South African to London for the occasion.

A month later, it seems that spam is not the only thing that is arriving in huge volumes for  the occasion. The Olympic Games will be leveraging log data to identify and prevent potentially threatening cyber attacks, according to Tech News World. Several Security Operation Centers or SOCs have been set up to monitor Cybersecurity threads around the clock, and an undisclosed “next generation” Security Information and Event Management system will be making use of all that log data to automatically spot anomalies in the network.

The software is capable of not only catching security breaches but will also be able to take countermeasures in certain situations.

“Another primary role of the SIEM solution will be helping SOC operators respond to threats detected from automated real-time analytics or via manual analysis by security teams. In this role, the SIEM will need to provide fast access to forensic data for further analysis, decision making, and response.”

The London Olympics are protected by a multi-layer security system compromised of both machine and human personnel. This year will definitely prove to be a challenge for hackers.