It seems that the suspicions of the Greek authorities for the perpetrators of the malicious attacks on the examination system are directed at Kremlin-aligned hackers who launch attacks against countries that are against Russian interests.

The platform received 165 million hits from 114 countries, with the Ministry of Education calling it the biggest cyberattack ever on a public organization.

At the same time, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court ordered an investigation to identify the perpetrators, while Prime Minister Ioannis Sarmas convened a broad meeting of the relevant Ministries and agencies to assess the situation.

The Killnet Team

According to ANT1, the two attacks on the Theme Bank had the characteristics of the Russian group “Killnet” which has attacked by means of DDOS-type attacks in many countries, such as Norway, Estonia, Italy, Canada, and the USA.

The team members do not aim to steal data, but to disrupt service in the event of excessive demand, so as to delay or completely crash sensitive service systems such as bank networks, hospital networks, research centers, and airline networks. Recently, they even attacked the systems of the Eurovision account.

In fact, that’s exactly what the group’s name means: “Kill the Network” given to them by a denial of service tool due to high artificial demand from hundreds of countries around the world.

The team is not interested in financial gain, although yesterday’s attack alone must have cost 150.000 to 200.000 euros. After starting operations in Ukraine the team created two subgroups: “Special Digital Forces of the Russian Federation” and “Legion”.

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Yesterday and the day before the group in question tried to attack the Theme Bank from three different sides, which set the government mechanisms in motion following the orders of the acting Prime Minister, Mr. Ioannis Sharmas, who ordered the Ministry of Defence and the security services to be on alert in view of the Panhellenic exams.

The cyberattack

The DDoS attack (distributed denial of service) is one of the methods most commonly used by hackers to “disrupt” websites and services. Internet security company McAfee explains the attack, comparing it with a… traffic jam.

Cybercriminals manage to “crash” a website or service by directing such a large volume of traffic to the site that the network fails to respond as it should.

This means that normal website traffic suddenly cannot be served. DDoS attacks are, as experts explain, highly efficient and can cause serious problems. In essence, such an attack attempts to exhaust an application’s resources.

Also read: Medusa ransomware | Claims responsibility for cyberattack on the Open University of Cyprus