How to Build Secure Digital Infrastructure at World Cup Scale

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is not like any digital deployment most security teams have dealt with before. It spans 16 cities across three countries, three different legal jurisdictions, and a patchwork of infrastructure ecosystems that were never designed to work together. The risks are not contained to any one venue or any one system. They are distributed across an entire continent of interconnected digital services.

Most large-scale digital systems get months, sometimes years, of runway before they go live. Event-driven infrastructure gets weeks. And then it runs in front of a billion people. That combination of compressed timelines, distributed ownership, and global visibility is not a recipe for careful security planning. It is exactly the kind of environment where corners get cut and attackers know it.

This Is Not a Greenfield Build

The mistake most people make when thinking about securing an event like this is imagining it as a clean, purpose-built system. It is not. It is existing city infrastructure that has been temporarily adapted for tournament use. Stadium networks connect to vendor systems that connect to municipal services that connect to ticketing platforms. Each seam is a potential failure point.

Large sporting events create highly interconnected environments where stadium infrastructure, transportation systems, ticketing platforms, and municipal services become tightly coupled, allowing disruptions in one system to cascade into others. That is not a hypothetical. It is what happened at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, where a targeted attack on an IT service provider disrupted systems during the opening ceremony.

Large events also require organizations to onboard new vendors quickly, spin up new applications, expand mobile capacity, and connect systems that do not normally talk to each other. Every one of those integrations is a potential entry point. And the security testing done at the start of preparations often does not reflect the environment that actually exists by the time the tournament begins.

The Three Gaps That Matter Most

Across the threat landscape for this event, three areas stand out as consistently underprotected.

• The vendor and identity perimeter. Every host city is relying on temporary staff, contractors, volunteers, and expanded vendor networks. Rapid scaling creates insider vulnerability, whether that comes from negligence, poor security hygiene, or deliberate misuse. When you cannot fully vet everyone with access, access controls become the last line of defense, and they need to be treated that way from day one.
• Consumer-facing authentication. The FBI has warned that threat actors are actively creating spoofed FIFA websites designed to steal credentials, payment information, and personal data from fans, and has already identified dozens of malicious domains impersonating official World Cup properties. Researchers have noted that the risk in online platforms comes from anything that asks users to create an account, pay a fee, log in with a social account, or enter personal data. The objective, in every case, is the same: steal credentials, payment information, and identity data. The burden of distinguishing safe from fraudulent cannot fall on the user. It has to fall on the platforms.
• The supply chain blind spot. A Proofpoint study found that 36 percent of official World Cup sponsors, suppliers, and partners have not adopted the highest level of email authentication controls. That means a large portion of the trusted ecosystem surrounding this event is exposed to domain spoofing and impersonation attacks. You can build a bulletproof core system and still get breached through a catering vendor’s compromised login credentials.

Five Things Security Teams Should Do Right Now

The World Cup presents an extreme version of a problem that is actually common: building and securing digital infrastructure fast, under pressure, with incomplete information. These five principles apply whether you are supporting a global sporting event or shipping a product launch next quarter.

1. Start with identity architecture, not authentication bolted on later. Define who gets access to what before the first line of code is written. Privilege should be the default constraint. Too many teams treat authentication as something to configure after the system is built, and by then the structural decisions that make access control hard are already baked in.
2. Treat every third-party integration as a threat vector until it proves otherwise. A single routing change, a newly exposed API endpoint, or a modified firewall policy can create vulnerabilities that are invisible under normal operating conditions. Map every dependency in the ecosystem and audit it with the same skepticism you would apply to an unknown external system.
3. Enforce MFA everywhere, including for temporary and seasonal users, but be deliberate about the type of MFA you deploy. Standard one-time codes and SMS-based authentication can be defeated by fake World Cup sites where attackers can intercept codes in real time through a convincing phishing page. Alternatively, phishing-resistant MFA, like passkeys, closes that gap since they are cryptographically bound to the legitimate domain where they were created. The type of MFA you choose is a critical decision that determines whether your authentication protects users or just creates the appearance of doing so. 
4. Build for graceful degradation, not just breach prevention. At this scale, something will be compromised. The real question is whether one breached component can cascade into the rest of the system. Segmenting venue technology, operational technology, and utility systems from corporate IT infrastructure is the difference between a contained incident and one that interrupts a globally broadcast match.
5. Unify customer identity across every fan-facing touchpoint. Someone buying a ticket should not have to create separate accounts across the official site, the mobile app, and an affiliate site. Beyond the friction it creates, fragmented identity is a security problem since every additional account a fan creates is another set of credentials that can be phished, reused, exposed, or breached. When identity is siloed across systems, there is also no single place to monitor for suspicious behavior or enforce consistent policies. A unified login experience is not just better for the fan, it also gives security teams a single view of who is accessing what, across every touchpoint, in real time.  

The Broader Lesson

Most organizations will never face a deployment at World Cup scale. But the underlying challenge is not unique to mega-events. Any team spinning up infrastructure quickly, onboarding new vendors, or scaling a product under deadline pressure faces the same fundamental problem: security decisions made fast, with limited information, under conditions that keep changing.

The teams that handle it well are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that treat security as a priority from the beginning rather than a checklist item at the end. The World Cup is just a very public reminder of what happens when the stakes are high and that discipline breaks down.