ATHENS, GREECE — Greece announced plans on Monday to enhance parental oversight of mobile devices in 2025 through a government-operated app that will help get digital age verification and browsing controls. 

Dimitris Papastergiou, the minister of digital governance, said the Kids Wallet app, due to launch in March, was aimed at safeguarding children under the age of 15 from the risks of excessive and inappropriate internet use. 

The app will be run by a widely used government services platform and operate in conjunction with an existing smartphone app for adults to carry digital identification documents. 

“It’s a big change,” Papastergiou told reporters, adding that the app would integrate advanced algorithms to monitor usage and apply strict authentication processes. 

“The Kids Wallet application will do two main things: It will make parental control much easier, and it will be our official national tool for verifying the age of users,” he said. 

A survey published this month by Greek research organization KMOP found that 76.6% of children ages 9-12 have access to the internet via personal devices, 58.6% use social media daily, and 22.8% have encountered inappropriate content. 

Many lack awareness of basic safety tools such as the block and report buttons, authors of the study said. 

Papastergiou said the government was hoping to have the children’s app preinstalled on smartphones sold in Greece by the end of 2025. 

While facing criticism from some digital rights and religious groups, government-controlled apps and online services — many introduced during the pandemic — are generally popular in Greece, as they are seen as a way of bypassing historically slow bureaucratic procedures. 

The planned online child protection measures would go further than regulations already in place in several European countries by introducing more direct government involvement. 

They will also help hold social media platforms more accountable for enforcing age controls, Papastergiou said. 

“What’s the elephant in the room? Clearly, it’s how we define and verify a person’s age,” he said. “When you have an [online] age check, you might have a 14-year-old claiming they are 18. Or you could have someone who actually is a genuine 20-year-old. … Now we can address that.”
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WASHINGTON — Chinese hackers remotely accessed several U.S. Treasury Department workstations and unclassified documents after compromising a third-party software service provider, the agency said Monday. 

The department did not provide details on how many workstations had been accessed or what sort of documents the hackers may have obtained, but it said in a letter to lawmakers revealing the breach that “at this time there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury information.” 

“Treasury takes very seriously all threats against our systems, and the data it holds,” the department said. “Over the last four years, Treasury has significantly bolstered its cyber defense, and we will continue to work with both private and public sector partners to protect our financial system from threat actors.” 

The department said it learned of the problem on Dec. 8 when a third-party software service provider, BeyondTrust, flagged that hackers had stolen a key used by the vendor that helped it override the system and gain remote access to several employee workstations. 

The compromised service has since been taken offline, and there’s no evidence that the hackers still have access to department information, Aditi Hardikar, an assistant Treasury secretary, said in the letter Monday to leaders of the Senate Banking Committee. 

The department said it was working with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and that the hack had been attributed to Chinese culprits. It did not elaborate.
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