Greece's Cyber Crime Unit Will Be Keeping this Sunday's Election Safe from Hackers

This post originally appeared on VICE Greece

Greece has a general election coming up on Sunday, and the Greek police are worried about potential hacking attacks that could disrupt the broadcasting of the results. I met Manolis Sfakianakis, Director of the Greek police's Cyber Crime Division to talk about how he's going to make sure there aren't any surprises this Sunday.

VICE: Have you had to worry about hacking in past elections?
Manolis Sfakianakis: We've had to fight off thousands of hacking attempts in the past. In fact, Anonymous tweeted after the last election, that that was the first time they saw a government tool operating so well. There was a constant influx of attacks to our systems and we did everything in our power to fight them off—whether it had to do with system failures or data transfers. So that's what we are going to do this time around, too.

Is data transfer more dangerous than it sounds?
Certainly. Data results are transferred to their base, and the base is what runs the whole electoral procedure. If anything goes wrong, the election is all up in the air. On Sunday, at 6PM my team will be setting up camp at the Ministry of Interior Affairs in order to protect the results of the upcoming elections.

How many people make up your team?
There are 80 of us. Cyber crime is all about forensics. We have recruited people with postgraduate and doctoral qualifications. They are young people—with an average age of 28. We are very well prepared—everyone knows who does what. Figuratively, you could say that we are armed to the teeth.

How did you deal with these attacks in the past?
We are a well-operating machine and constantly on alert, so we were able to prevent them. We didn't have to fix any damages. So once these strikes were shut off, we were able to launch the elections properly and not disturb the process at all.

All these attacks have the ability to bring down the ministries' operational systems, as well as disrupt the voting machines that transfer the results. In short, these kind of things can totally block the results' flow.

Can a block in the results flow distort the results?
Once one enters a base and a computer system, anything can be altered or distorted.

Can someone do that in a way that is undetectable from your system?
No. Every system has a shield, that in a way operates like an oscilloscope, which records heartbeats. If anyone enters and changes something in the system, it is recorded and then it is our turn to see whether that change was hostile or not. In short, no one can prevent us from detecting an attack.

Is there any indication of a hacking attack this Sunday?
No. There have been no indications, and that is extremely suspicious.

Things are a little too quiet, eh? Were there any indications in the past?
No. There was no evidence of this sort, but eventually they happened.

I know you worry about an attack by Anonymous, but are there any domestic groups you are worried about?
Yes, those hacking groups are primarily domestic. They are usually made up of young people, looking to ridicule the process. When they are politically motivated, they belong to an extremist mentality.

But we know who they are and how they operate. So far we've played nice but they know we can track them down if we wanted to. We have many allies in this game, people who really know what they are doing.