The FIFA 2026 World Cup tournament has opened our eyes to the complexities of implementing border intelligence and protection measures for a tri-nation event drawing six million visitors from around the world.
With the Summer Olympics arriving in Los Angeles in 2028 (“LA28”) and major international sporting events and concert tours unfolding, there’s likewise opportunity to reassess how we handle security at major events themselves.
Glaring media spotlights will only amplify the impact of security breaches within and around these high-profile events, and that’s much of the allure for criminals and terrorists – to amplify the anxieties of attendees and global spectators. Still other criminals will exploit cyber infrastructure associated with these events, and some will simply show for the large number of unsuspecting victims – many of them tourists – vulnerable to common crime.
This is not the outcome we want for these events. Nor do we want endless queues of attendees stuck at security gates, souring their experience with the host city/country. There needs to be a careful balance.
With LA28 approaching, there’s opportunity for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to evolve from a reactive response mindset to an approach that emphasizes proactive prevention of security breaches leveraging open-source intelligence (OSINT), Signal and visual intelligence, cyber and other tools.
Deluge of Data
Strategies for securing major events have traditionally centered on perimeter security – guarded gates and checkpoints. Today, it’s understood that security measures can and should extend well beyond the physical arena, in a manner that harnesses diverse sensors and open-source data.
This is no easy feat.
For a major event like LA28, data pours in from thousands of sources: open-source media and messaging platforms, CCTV, travel manifests, field sensor data, multi-agency reports and much more. The volume and velocity of the data is overwhelming. It’s no wonder security teams succumb to ‘analysis paralysis’ – unable to find the needle in the haystack, the ‘lone wolf’ in the crowded arena.
The aforementioned sensor data arrives from staggered perimeters in a funnel, from within and outside the event arena itself and extending to city and state law enforcement, national agencies (FBI, DHS, ATF, DEA) and ultimately to border security (CBP). These security circles need to communicate effectively and efficiently. The hand-over of data between them must be seamless.
The challenge is compounded when one considers the international multi-agency coordination happening behind the scenes ahead of these high-profile events. This introduces even more disparate data to be captured and correlated (Interpol flags, watch lists, suspect identifiers, etc.) – and there’s a very limited window of cooperation for crunching all this data.
INTERPOL’s Project Stadia is squarely aimed at securing major events like LA28. Since its inception in 2012 (a byproduct of Qatar’s plans to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup), it’s helped member countries plan and execute safety and security arrangements for major international sports tournaments. This includes recommendations for centralizing shareable data in a worldwide information hub.
Project Stadia is a great start. Amid the data deluge, the implementation isn’t easy.
Protecting Against Lone Wolves
Organized terror is an ever-present concern for major events, but lone wolf actors and radicalized individuals are harder to detect through traditional surveillance. The Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 are testaments to this phenomenon. Both attacks are infamous. And both were implemented by the smallest possible threat network – a pair of brothers.
Lone wolves leave scant digital footprints. They’re the threats that keep security analysts awake at night.
But lone wolf attackers do in fact leave digital breadcrumbs, in some cases across the open, deep and dark web, and more frequently in plain sight and traceable with OSINT. This was evident in the Minneapolis church/school attack of 2025, where the sole attacker’s online footprint revealed clear pre-attack intent markers.
It’s imperative to scan all layers of the web, including open-source data, to identify emerging extremist rhetoric and/or call-to-action posts targeting specific venues. This allows law enforcement to intervene before an individual reaches the stadium perimeter.
Much can be revealed from publicly and commercially available OSINT data. But it’s yet another layer of data to contend with.
The Digital Side Show
Mega-events like LA28 will attract massive cyber fraud – fake ticketing, phishing campaigns targeting fans and crypto scams. This only adds to the strain on law enforcement agencies, and it ruins the fan experience.
There was a 2.5X increase in cyber-attacks between the 2012 London Olympics and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. On that trajectory, it’s anticipated that the 2026 World Cup will be targeted with more than one billion attempted cyber operations. It’s inevitable that some will be successful.
Advanced tools today can help law enforcement track the flow of illicit funds stemming from cyber activity like this. By linking fraudulent ticket sellers to crypto wallets, for example, investigators can identify and dismantle the financial networks behind large-scale event scams.
But the data deluge only grows, and grows more complicated at that.
Holistic Data for Sharper Intelligence
Investigators and analysts concur – and lament – that this tremendous volume of sensor, OSINT and other data typically arrives to them in silos, making threat correlations a mostly manual process. At major events, for all the available technology at our fingertips, event security often boils down to a handful of agents and analysts clustered together in a physical room, overcoming the system and data silos with notebooks and telephones. And the intelligence technology infrastructure that was successfully put in place will likely be disassembled immediately after the event.
Major events can’t be adequately secured with isolated tools and data flows. Security teams need the agility to connect intelligence across borders, agencies, data sources and investigative workflows.
Law enforcement, investigators and intelligence analysts need to work together and in the same data ecosystem. This integration can enable analysts to move seamlessly from detection to investigation to operational response without losing context or wasting time reconciling data from separate silos.
In large-scale event security operations – where speed, coordination and situational awareness are essential – the shift from isolated tools to integrated intelligence platforms can significantly improve operational efficiency and investigative outcomes. Decision intelligence platforms that are preloaded with OSINT data and customized analytics allow analysts to correlate open-source data directly alongside internal intelligence, investigative records and other data sources.
These capabilities were once impossible to achieve, but the technology we wield today makes it possible.
The ability to automatically fuse huge, disparate data silos into a single, cohesive view can be leveraged in tandem with AI and ML to quickly and readily connect the dots between seemingly unrelated events – a social media post in one city and a suspicious financial transaction in another. By running agentic decision flows that reduce repetitive investigative steps, analysts remove the overhead of multiple checks that create security bottlenecks for quicker actionable insights. This automated and precise link analysis, pattern and anomalies detection culminates in careful, continuous security measures that deny event entry to criminal disruptors and terrorists.
There’s also an opportunity – an opportunity for host cities, states and nations to architect a permanent, smarter security infrastructure in the wake of major events, one that prioritizes cross-agency and international collaboration.
With millions of spectators, world dignitaries and the greatest athletes on earth descending on the Olympics, Los Angeles will again take the spotlight on the global stage. The threat surface for events like LA28 is massive. In a world of evolving threats, actionable intelligence distilled from mountains of data is the only way to ensure the games and athletes remain the focus.
