Unfortunately on June 24th Italy lost 1-0 to Uruguay in their Group D World Cup match. The defeat meant that Italy was eliminated from the 2014 World Cup tournament. Yet, besides the disappointment of the many Italians who were following the game, there’s a part of Italy that already won the World Cup, but very few people know about it. This is represented by the many Italian companies involved in the 2014 World Cup organization that are playing a crucial role in cyber intelligence.
When Brazil was first suggested as the country to host the 2014 World Cup, many protests arose against the idea of organizing such a big sports event in a country in which a large part of the population still lives under the poverty threshold. Then the online cyber activists’ attacks began, followed by many scams by cyber criminals who wanted to take advantage of the huge amount of money and financial transactions generated by World Cup tourism. A group of experts was required to protect people and organizations from fraud. That’s when some Italian companies started to collaborate with Brazilian firms. It’s a very delicate responsibility, but thanks to technology, many small Italian companies are now operating on a global scale.
Tiger Security, a company from Orvieto, the beautiful town in the province of Terni, thanks to a partnership with the Brazilian company Intelliseng and together with four others, is protecting the Brazilian government computer security system from hackers and cyber attacks. Tiger Security is working on both a federal and a state level, ensuring that email accounts or websites are protected from hackers who want to take them over or simply make them impossible to use.
A typical example the potential threats is a “DdoS attack” which consists of a so called “bombing” of thousands of simultaneous access messages which cause a website to become unreachable and nonfunctional. Tiger Security is also working on using cyber intelligence to detect new kinds of threats. This made the Brazilian Government decide to keep collaborating with Tiger Security after the World Cup too, in order to get prepared for the next Olympics Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Deltatre is a company established in Turin in 1986 which gradually acquired an impressive number of high level clients all dealing with sports, such as Fifa, Uefa, Iaaf, Uci, Fina, and Fis. This year Deltatre took care of restyling and developing the main Fifa website, creating graphics for the games and also gathering, analyzing and providing statistics about soccer games, like number of goals, passes, fouls etc.
Another unknown but successful company is represented by Wyscout from Chiavari, a small town near Genoa, which created one of the benchmark approaches used by all the big soccer teams to select and discover new talents. Some of their clients include Barcelona and Arsenal.
Beast Technologies is a start up based in Brescia but developed in the Politecnico Di Milano, which invented a sensor named Beast, able to measure strength, power and speed of movements. This could be a revolution for sports coaching, and athletes are already starting to use it, including our national soccer team. One incredible feature of this new technology is its small dimension (barely 4 centimeters for 50 grams of weight) and the extreme handiness.
As Italians, we may be disappointed with the soccer results this year, but this unknown group of Italian companies facing a challenging role in the 2014 World Cup championship, should make us proud and hopeful about the future of the Italian industry.
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