The Athens Affair

Newswise — On 10 March 2005 the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of a number of cabinet ministers, the mayor of Athens, and at least 100 other high-ranking notables including an employee of the U.S. embassy. The victims were customers of Vodafone Greece, the country's largest cellular service provider. Given the list of people and their positions at the time of the tapping, we can only imagine the sensitive political and diplomatic discussions, high-stakes business deals, or even marital indiscretions that may have been routinely overheard and, quite possibly, recorded. Investigators had found rogue software installed on the Vodafone Greece phone network by parties unknown. Some extraordinarily knowledgeable people either penetrated the network from outside or subverted it from within, aided by an agent or "mole." In either case, the software at the heart of the phone system, investigators later discovered, was reprogrammed with a finesse and sophistication rarely seen before or since. In a byzantine twist worthy of a Greek tragedy, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis had just been found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. Tsalikidis was in charge of network planning at the company, so a connection seemed obvious. Yet none has been proved, and his family maintains that his death wasn't a suicide at all. Not only is there no evidence that Tsalikidis abetted the break-in, to this day, more than two years after the fact, we don't know who perpetuated the Athens Affair. If we don't have much information about whodunit, though, we at least know how. To piece together this story, authors Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis pored through hundreds of pages of depositions taken by the Greek parliamentary committee investigating the affair, obtained through a freedom of information request filed with the Greek parliament, and read through hundreds of pages of documentation and other records, supplemented by publicly available information and interviews with independent experts and sources associated with the case. Prevelakis is an assistant professor of computer science at Drexel University who specializes in network security. Spinellis is an associate professor in the department of management science and technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business. What emerges from their story are the technical details, if not the motivation, of a devilishly clever and complicated computer infiltration.