The Patras program, used by the German Federal Police for surveillance and tracking of suspects and their vehicles via GPS, has recently been suspended for a while and its servers taken offline due to a breach that was made possible by a most bizarre chain of events.


According to The Local, it all started with a senior official of the Federal Police in Frankfurt am Main wishing to find out what his daughter was doing online. In order to do that, he installed a Trojan on her computer.

But the Trojan was discovered by a hacker friend of hers, and in order to exact revenge on the spying father, he managed to break into his home computer. Unfortunately, the officer has made it so that his official emails are diverted to his private computer.

The hacker, having now access to everything on the machine, perused them and found out the information needed to penetrate the Patras servers from systems located in Russia. The German police, alarmed by the intrusion, took the servers and the system offline.

Whether the hacker friend was part of the “No Name Crew” hacker group, which is believed to have penetrated the Patras servers last summer and posted online some of the exfiltrated information, is yet unknown.