Greece’s Education System Hit By ‘Largest Ever’ Cyber Attack

Greece’s Education Ministry has been subjected to an unprecedented cyber attack, described as the most extensive in the country’s history. The malicious attempt aimed to disrupt the centralised high school examination platform known as the “Subject Bank”. The Subject Bank is an online platform utilised to administer end-of-year high school exams across the nation, setting a standard for all students. The Ministry reported that the large-scale and sustained DDoS attacks which have prevented access to the systems for multiple days this week.

What is a DDoS Attack?
The cyber attacks involved a technique known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), is a form of cyber attack where multiple compromised computers are used to flood a server with traffic, thereby overloading it and causing it to become unavailable or inaccessible for users.

This method was used to target the Subject Bank platform, with computers from an astonishing 114 countries involved in the attacks. While the assaults led to outages and delays in high school exams, the system has thus far managed to resist being completely crippled by the attack, the ministry has said.

The severity of the cyber attacks prompted a judicial investigation, ordered by a Supreme Court prosecutor and assisted by the police’s cyber crime division. “It is the most significant attack ever carried out against a Greek public or government organisation,” the education ministry said, underlining the scale and duration of the incidents. The fallout from the attacks left students waiting in classrooms for hours for their exams to start or being postponed. As Greece recovers from this significant cyber attack, the focus now turns to improving digital security measures to ensure that such an incident does not recur.

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