Spy Plot

In 2005, Greek authorities discovered a spying operation that tapped into the mobile phones of Greece’s prime minister and other top government officials. This is warning us of weaknesses in telecommunications systems that still use decades-old computer code.

The spying case, where the calls of around 100 people were secretly tapped, remains unsolved and is still being investigated. Also complicating the case is the questionable suicide in March 2005 of a top engineer at Vodafone Group in Greece in charge of network planning.

The case includes the "first known rootkit that has been installed in an [phone] exchange," said Diomidis Spinellis, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business.

A rootkit is a special program that buries itself deep into an OS for some malicious activity and is extremely difficult to detect. The software enabled the hackers to monitor phone calls in the same way law enforcement would, minus the required court order.