

The Athens Affair – The most audacious cell-network break-in (2007) - milkshakes
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair

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elorant
Audacious hackers my ass. That was clearly the job of some major foreign
intelligence service. The triangle of tampered antennas included among other
things the US embassy. Granted, we Greeks have a tendency for conspiracy
theories, especially if they involve Americans, but this particular attack was
_way_ too sophisticated to be carried by individuals. And how on earth would
an individual gain access to network infrastructure of one of the largest
carrier providers in the country?

Not to mention the fact that everyone in the list of targets were in one way
or the other directly connected with the government. Hackers usually don’t go
for such high-profile targets unless there are some state actors involved.

~~~
trab
This is the link to the wikipedia article about the "hack"
[http://tinyurl.com/l2pfdew](http://tinyurl.com/l2pfdew) (Using tiny url
because greek chars on the url get really messy on copy paste).

Translated excerpt from the wikipedia link above. "Two years later, in 2010
the case reopened with the advent of new evidence suggesting espionage with
involvement of the American embassy."

I put hack on double quotes because it was anything but a hack. This was
coordinated from within the phone carrier and the company that wrote the
software, with the management most probably being aware of it.

~~~
zz1
Every USA embassy is a spying station:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ndx...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ndx0eox0Lkg#t=1072)

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chollida1
> They took advantage of the fact that the AXE allows new software to be
> installed without rebooting the system, an important feature when any
> interruption would disconnect phone calls, lose text messages, and render
> emergency services unreachable. To let an AXE exchange run continuously for
> decades, as many of them do, Ericsson's software uses several techniques for
> handling failures and upgrading an exchange's software without suspending
> its operation. These techniques allow the direct patching of code loaded in
> the central processor, in effect altering the operating system on the fly.

Since the is an Ericsson switch my first thought was that they describing
Erlang's hot code swapping being used here.

Can anyone confirm if this is the case?

If so that's a pretty big testament to the robustness of Erlang that it can
allow switches to run for decades at a time and update themselves on the fly!

I really should be doing more with Erlang!

~~~
bglazer
> Executable code is what results when a software compiler turns source
> code—in the case of the AXE, programs written in the PLEX language—into the
> binary machine code that a computer processor executes.

That was my first thought as well, but it looks like they used a language
called "PLEX" that is specifically built for the AXE switches.

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tbhoc
Tsalikidis' family and their lawyers asked for the case to be reopened,
claiming that forensic medical examination results prove that Tsalikidis'
death could not have been suicide [1]

[1]
[http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=307811](http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=307811)

------
fithisux
No matter what people say, a young man is dead and no one is in jail. I am a
Greek , but I cannot see how this is good for my country and security. No
matter if a foreign agency is implicated, this is treason. They care for their
interest, we do not.

------
signa11
it is very difficult to imagine this kind of stuff happening right under the
noses of seasoned n/w administrators without implicit complicity of one or
more state actors...

~~~
mercurial
Considering the scale of the attack, it's pretty obvious that state actors are
behind it.

