Russian Hackers Leak Medical Info of Athletes

Tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams on court at the Rio 2016 Olympics. Image Credit: Charles Krupa / AP.

A group of Russian hackers has illegally accessed the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) athlete database, released private medical information of top athletes and claimed to have found evidence of doping.

The Russian cyber-espionage group calls itself the Tsar Team, otherwise known as APT28 or Fancy Bear.

The hackers accused US tennis pros Serena and Venus Williams, star basketball athlete Elena Delle Donne and American gymnastics star Simone Biles of testing positive for non-authorized drugs. The hacker group overlooked the fact that the agency had approved the use of certain medications by the famous athletes for medical reasons.

After Fancy Bear revealed Simone Biles had tested positive for ADHD drug Ritalin, the gymnastics sportsgirl publically acknowledged having had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for years.

“Having ADHD, and taking medicine for it is nothing to be ashamed of nothing that I’m afraid to let people know,” Simone Biles stated on Twitter.

In a news release, WADA acknowledged the hacker group likely accessed the information via spear-phishing of email accounts and that the group might release more sensitive medical information in a bid to expose “the US Olympic team and their dirty methods to win.”

Russian to English translation services were not needed to uncover what Fancy Bear stated on its website: “This is just the tip of the iceberg. Today’s sport is truly contaminated while the world is unaware of a large number of American doping athletes.”

“WADA deeply regrets this situation and is very conscious of the threat that it represents to athletes whose confidential information has been divulged through this criminal act,” said WADA director general Olivier Niggli to members of the media.

The director general mentioned his agency’s McLaren Investigation Report in his address. Released in May, the report confirmed Russian athletes had engaged in state-sanctioned doping during the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

“Let it be known that these criminal acts are greatly compromising the effort by the global anti-doping community to re-establish trust in Russia further to the outcomes of the Agency’s independent McLaren Investigation Report,” he added.