Greece Orders Probe Into Massive School Exam Cyber-Attack

Greece's Supreme Court Public Prosecutor Isidoros Dogiakos ordered an investigation into a cyber-attack on the data bank providing the school exam questions, with the assistance of the Police's Cyber Crime Unit.

End-of-high-school exams in Greece were disrupted on Monday and Tuesday by a massive cyber-attack on the data bank providing the questions, causing delays, cancellation of exams, and havoc among teachers and students.

The caretaker Ministries of Education and Religious Affairs and Digital Governance, in a shared press release, said the school exams platform received large-scale and long-lasting distributed denial-of-service, DDoS, attacks (up to 280,000 connections per second). DDoS attacks aims to disrupt the normal traffic of a system and bring it down.

"The exam bank platform received 165 million hits from 114 countries. It is the most significant attack ever made on a Greek public government organisation," the ministries said, adding that the DDoS attack is not a breach of the system, nor are they able to gain access to its components and data.

Ioannis Sarmas, of the caretaker PM's press office, said that the attacks were powerful and indicated a strong motive and high technical know-how but were successfully deflected by several ministries. The statement said that the state's organisational and operational capabilities could activate whatever defence is necessary to manage future cyber-attacks.

It's not the first time hackers have targeted Greek public bodies. In March 2022, hackers used ransomware and brought down Greek Post's computer systems. On January 17, two hospitals in the Attika region, Sotiria, and Asklipieio Voulas, fell victim to cyber blackmailers who used the same type of ransomware.