Greece's Education Ministry Faces Unprecedented Cyber Attack Targeting High School Exam Platform
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- 09 Jun 2023
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Greece's Ministry of Education has announced that it has fallen victim to a cyber assault of unprecedented scale in the country's history. The attack specifically targeted a centralized high school examination platform, employing distributed denial of service (DDoS) techniques to overwhelm the system. This malicious activity persisted for two consecutive days, resulting in intermittent service disruptions and delays during high school exams. However, the system managed to withstand the onslaught and remain functional, albeit with occasional outages.
The Ministry revealed that this cyber onslaught involved a network of computers from a staggering 114 nations, implicating an international scope. The severity of the situation has prompted the Supreme Court prosecutor to initiate a judicial investigation, with the assistance of the police's cybercrime division. The Ministry emphasized that this assault represents the most significant cyber attack ever directed at a Greek public or governmental institution, describing it as a "large-scale and prolonged" incident.
In Greece, end-of-year high school exams are conducted through an online platform called the Subject Bank, which ensures a standardized evaluation process nationwide. Regrettably, the disruptions caused by the cyberattacks resulted in students waiting for hours in classrooms before their exams could commence. These disturbances have fueled political tensions, following inconclusive general elections earlier this month. To oversee the government's affairs until a new election on June 25, a caretaker government has been established, with the conservative New Democracy party, previously in power, favored to win re-election.
The spokesperson for the main opposition party, left-wing Syriza, Popi Tsananidou, expressed dissatisfaction, stating, "Thus far, all we have seen is a haughty dereliction of duty by the New Democracy government, which, over four years, failed to implement adequate digital security measures to safeguard the Subject Bank platform and ensure smooth conduct of school examinations."
In response to the cyberattacks, Caretaker Prime Minister Ioannis Sarmas convened a meeting to address the issue. A statement from his office acknowledged the intensity of the attacks and the existence of strong motivation and expertise behind them. However, the statement did not identify the responsible parties responsible for the disruption. The Prime Minister's office assured the public that the attacks had been effectively repelled and affirmed that Greek authorities would mobilize all necessary resources to combat future cyber threats.
