Pro-Russian Hacker Group Launches Cyberattacks on Italian Airports and Foreign Ministry

Italian police said Saturday that they were investigating cyberattacks claimed by a pro-Russian group targeting several websites including those of Milan’s airports and the foreign ministry.

The websites of the ministry, Malpensa and Milan-Linate airport, and the transport systems in Siena and Turin were hit, according to national cybersecurity police.

“It is the third hacker attack (on the foreign ministry) in the last three days,” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told journalists. “Today’s attack is certainly of Russian origin,” he said.

Tajani said he has ordered the creation of a new cybersecurity and artificial intelligence department within the ministry and was “raising the security threshold even further” in Italy’s embassies.

The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057(16) claimed responsibility for the attacks in a Telegram post, cybersecurity police spokesman Marco Valerio Cervellini said on LinkedIn.

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“We have been registering attacks of this type on various infrastructures and ministerial sites for three days,” Ivano Gabrielli, director of Italy’s postal police, told AdnKronos news agency.

“These are attacks cyclically carried out by groups that support the Russian war on Ukrainian soil”, he said.

The NoName057(16) group is known for targeting public institutions and strategic sectors in NATO countries that have supported Ukraine in its struggle against Russia’s invasion.

Russian intelligence services were blamed for a large-scale cyberattack against Ukraine on Dec. 20, which led to the suspension of several government sites including the Unified and State Registers under the jurisdiction of Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice. 

The Cybersecurity Department of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it had opened a criminal investigation into the cyberattack, according to a social media post. 

“The main [scenario] being considered by the SBU is that Russian intelligence services, specifically groups linked to the GRU [Russia’s military intelligence agency] of the Russian General Staff, are behind this cyberattack,” said acting head of the SBU Cybersecurity Department, Volodymyr Karastelov, adding that “an investigation is currently underway to assess the possibility of data leakage as a result of the large-scale cyberattack on the state registers.”

As of midday on Dec 20, the National Information Systems (NAIS) website, the Ministry of Justice, the Unified and State Registers (about 60 different registers) were still not functioning.