Greece’s Supreme Court launched on Tuesday an urgent investigation into the cyber-attacks targeting the Greek high school exams that were interrupted two days running.
Following a second cyber-attack on the data bank providing the exam questions, Supreme Court Public Prosecutor Isidoros Dogiakos ordered an investigation with the assistance of the Hellenic Police Cyber Crime Unit.
Among others, Dogiakos specified that the law-enforcement authorities seeking to find the culprits may proceed to confiscate evidence and other clues that may lead to those responsible.
The end-of-year exams in Greek high schools throughout the country were severely disrupted on Monday and again on Tuesday by cyber-attacks that overloaded the system and caused the platform to crash, leading to hours-long delays and even some cancellations of exams.
No group took responsibility nor was it reported why the exams were targeted although media reports said the attacks disabled the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) platform.
Cyber attack “most significant” ever carried out in Greece
The Education Ministry said the attack was “the most significant ever carried out against a Greek public or government organization.”
It said the distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks occurred on two consecutive days – Monday and Tuesday – when the exam data bank platform received 165 million hits involving computers from 114 countries, causing outages and delays in high school exams but failing to incapacitate the system.
End-of-year high school exams in Greece are administered using an online platform known as the Subject Bank, designed to set a uniform standard nationwide.
An assurance that the nationwide university entrance examinations will be carried out as normal and “with absolute safety” was given in a joint announcement by the caretaker government’s education and digital governance ministries on Tuesday.
The ministries also stressed that no final-year high school student will be shut out of the university entrance exams by cyber-attacks, pointing out that the platform for the school exams was entirely separate from the system for transmitting the questions in the nationwide university entrance exams.
The outages, which sparked a political fallout in the midst of the election campaign, kept students waiting in classrooms for hours for exams to begin.
“All we’ve got so far is an arrogant abdication of responsibility from New Democracy, which for four years failed to take adequate digital protection measures to shield the Subject Bank platform and ensure that school examinations run smoothly,” said Popi Tsananidou, a spokeswoman for left-wing main opposition party SYRIZA.
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