The Athens Affair

This month's cover story in IEEE Spectrum is about a bunch of engo's that have taken fraud to a whole new level, hacking into the mobile phone conversations of such high profile victims as the Prime Minister of Greece and high ranking military officials. It seems that it was an inside job - the head of network operations for Vodafone Greece took his own life - but the exact details are anyone's guess.

"A study of the Athens affair, surely the most bizarre and embarrassing scandal ever to engulf a major cellphone service provider, sheds considerable light on the measures networks can and should take to reduce their vulnerability to hackers and moles.

It's also a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of one of the most elusive of cybercrimes. Major network penetrations of any kind are exceedingly uncommon. They are hard to pull off, and equally hard to investigate.

Even among major criminal infiltrations, the Athens affair stands out because it may have involved state secrets, and it targeted individuals—a combination that, if it had ever occurred before, was not disclosed publicly. The most notorious penetration to compromise state secrets was that of the “Cuckoo's Egg,” a name bestowed by the wily network administrator who successfully pursued a German programmer in 1986. The programmer had been selling secrets about the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) to the Soviet KGB."

Think of the things that could have been heard/recorded - love affairs, corruption, other illicit activity. Maybe these guys were using their programming skills for good, instead of evil?