on january 10, 2018, the "fancy bears hack team" online persona leaked what appeared to be stolen international olympic committee (ioc) and u.s. olympic committee emails, dated from late 2016 to early 2017, were leaked in apparent retaliation for the ioc's banning of russian athletes from the 2018 winter olympics as a sanction for russia's systematic doping program. the attack resembles the earlier world anti-doping agency (wada) leaks. it is not known whether the emails are fully authentic, because of fancy bear's history of salting stolen emails with disinformation. the mode of attack was also not known, but was probably phishing.