ATHENS, Greece~The Greek Ministry of Education has informed the public that a significant cyberattack has been launched with the intention of bringing down the system used to administer national high school exams.
It asserted that Tuesday was the second consecutive day that the platform had been hit with DDoS attacks that were designed to bring it to its knees. The attack, which the ministry stated affected computers in 114 countries, resulted in disruptions to the system as well as delays in the administration of high school tests. However, the system was not entirely compromised by the attack. The hacking incidents have been sent to the cybercrime division of the police force upon the request of a prosecutor from the Supreme Court.
The Greek Education Ministry described the attacks that took place on Monday and Tuesday as “large scale” and “of sustained duration,” referring to them as the “most significant attack ever carried out against a Greek public or government organization.” The Subject Bank is the name of the standardized online testing platform that Greek students use to complete their year-ending examinations.
Students were forced to wait in their classrooms for several hours before the start of their exams as a result of power outages, which also sparked a political dispute after an election earlier this month that was inconclusive. The interim administration will remain in place until new elections are held on June 25, with the conservative New Democracy party being viewed as the likely party to emerge victorious in those polls.
Popi Tsananidou, a spokeswoman for the main opposition party Syriza, which is on the left, said, “All we have so far is an arrogant abdication of responsibility by the New Democracy government.” This refers to the fact that the New Democracy government failed to take adequate digital protection measures for the Subject Bank platform and to ensure that school examinations ran smoothly for four years.
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