The Athens Affair – A Network Break-In

An electrical engineer in charge of network planning for the largest cellular provider in Greece is found hanging in his apartment – an apparent suicide. The prime minister of the country, along with 100 other high-ranking officials, are all informed that their phones have been bugged. And, after a little digging, investigators start to find that someone performed some extremely sophisticated dirty work on the network, though they couldn’t determine whether it was an outsider or a mole. The stakes were high – tremendously high – because this individual or group of individuals could have recorded sensitive conversations relevant to the military and political affairs of the state. But whether they did or not still remains in question. A detailed review of this strange case of cellular espionage, called the Athens Affair, is available on IEEE Spectrum, and absolutely worth the read.—Gregory Mone