Seb Coe sorry after IAAF is hacked by Fancy Bears cyber attackers

‘Sincere apology’: IAAF chief Seb Coe
Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images

Seb Coe today apologised to athletes after the IAAF revealed they had fallen victim to the Fancy Bear cyber attackers.

The governing body fear the attack on their network has “compromised athletes’ therapeutic use exemption applications stored on IAAF servers”.

The Fancy Bears were behind the hack into the doping files at the World Anti-Doping Agency, which revealed the therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs), sparking a debate over their use.

The cases are believed to date back to 2012 and all the athletes who are affected were today contacted by the IAAF.

IAAF president Coe said: “Our first priority is to the athletes who have provided the IAAF with information that they believed would be secure and confidential.

“They have our sincerest apologies and our total commitment to continue to do everything in our power to remedy the situation.”

The attack was detected by the cyber incident response firm Context Information Security, which was contacted to undertake a technical investigation across their system.

In a statement, the IAAF said: “The presence of unauthorised remote access to the IAAF network was noted on February 21 where metadata on athlete TUEs was collected from a file server and stored in a newly-created file.

“It is not known if this information was subsequently stolen from the network.”

The Fancy Bears — believed to be Russian — have yet to take responsibility for the IAAF cyber-attack.

The WADA hack led to a host of TUE applications, among them those of Sir Bradley Wiggins, being publicised.

Other big sporting names included Serena Williams and Simone Biles as well as British competitors in Rio, among them Alistair Brownlee and Mo Farah, all of whom have denied any wrongdoing.

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