Greek authorities on the warpath against Turkish-led cyber attacks

Competent Greek officials speak of a "power game, a show of force, a game of cyberspace, like the most dangerous dogfights every day in the Aegean." The Greek side is preparing "containment" measures with blocking walls and the return of cyberattacks to other storage sites, while the Digital Policy Ministry is preparing a recruitment competition for 100 online specialists to deal with the issue.

Greek countermeasures come from the notion that beyond a painless impression game, these cyberattacks inflict significant harm on the owners of websites that receive them, and especially on business, banking or commercial sites. According to relevant Greek and European research, 80% of bank customers, online shopping websites and businesses, when they see repeated… scams on their websites, are scared and change their preferences. Even more serious is the dimension given by competent EYP officials to the Greek websites of government agencies that provide social services for citizens.

Greek agencies see MIT behind attacks

The Greek security authorities responsible for the cyberattacks recorded on 17 and 23 January 2020 have at least two suspect Turkish cyber spy groups. One is ANKANEFERLER TIM and the other is AKINACILAR, behind which MIT agents or state-affiliated officials in Tayyip Erdogan' Turkey are hiding, according to law enforcement officials. Electronic traces have been identified but it is very difficult to reach these groups. However, as part of the search for more evidence, a case file is being gathered by the Directorate of Cybercrime.

The attacks were done by remotely converting computers into ... their own slave computers. They send special "Trojan horse" software by mail, message on facebook, to "remotely" control these computers. They then launch massive D-DOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks to overload Greek websites making them inactive, effectively blocking the network, which stops responding due to traffic…

In this way, on January 17, 2020, they attacked the websites of the Hellenic Parliament, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, the Athens Stock Exchange, the National Intelligence Service, the Greek Interoperability Framework for E-Government. They were characterized as distributed denial of service attacks by overloading web pages so that they could not serve the requests they received and collapsed.

On January 23, 2020, some government websites were found to be malfunctioning or delaying, so loading time would expire and they would not open. The target was again the page of the Hellenic Parliament, Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Finance, Home Affairs, Rural Development, Shipping, Culture, the General Secretariat for Information Systems, the Independent Public Revenue Office, the Greek Police and the Prime Minister…