How Russia, China and hacker attacks affect Italy’s security. The intelligence report

The Italian intelligence sector has published the 2022 Annual Report on Information Security Policy. Within the approximately one hundred pages of the report we find all the major issues that affect every day the work of the information systems and therefore on the concrete security of Italy. In 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine it has had a profound impact not only for our country, but also for the very notion of “world order”, which has been put into strong and continuous discussion.

Among the facets that make up the factors of global instability, according to intelligence, there are irregular immigration, food insecurity, developments in the most unstable parts of the earth (such as that of the Middle East and North Africa area, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and central and southern Africa) and also the process that is regionalizing the jihadist terrorism. At the national level, however, the report investigates various aspects: from economic-financial security to cyber security, and still jihadist terrorism and subversion or extremism.

Russian aggression of Ukraine

As regards the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Italy’s strategic attention has focused on those factors that could condition the trajectories of the conflict. As main points there are the conditions for a possible just and credible peace, the implications for European security and the future of the occupied Ukrainian territories from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It will therefore be necessary to understand the conditions useful for ending the Russian bombing of infrastructure and the civilian population; but also monitor how, when and up to where the Ukrainian counter-offensive will continue, and, last but not least, take into account the sustainability of the military effort for both sides.

However, the nine packages of Western economic sanctions on Russia have had the greatest concrete impact on Italy. For our state the inevitable implications concern the loss of trade (Italian exports to Russia were worth 7.7 billion; while imports include fossil fuels, but also products in iron, clay, aluminum and other raw materials, which have undergone sharp increases).

China

The key factors affecting Beijing are its relationship with Moscow and its competition with the United States. In 2022, relations between China and Russia immediately revealed a great affinity of purpose between the two nations. “Friendship between the two states has no limits and there are no forbidden areas of cooperation”, proclaimed Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at the end of the Beijing summit on February 4, 2022. However, this unity of objectives is placed in an opposing perspective regarding the possible enlargement of Nato and neither China nor Russia seem to have any intention of supporting each other at a military level.

And despite the enormous economic disproportion between Beijing and Moscow, on which the obstacles of their alliance are based, Xi Jinping’s China still seems far from catching up with the United States. In fact, overtaking China does not appear obvious: the latter’s growth is constantly slowing down, while the United States continues to grow. Not to mention that Beijing is very reluctant to liberalize its capital flows. Furthermore, China often relies on imported technology and the demographic situation is also favorable – because it has been demonstrated that the population will continue to increase in the coming years – for Washington.

As far as the regional dimension of the Dragon is concerned, Beijing has for some time been expressing its intention to reunite with Taiwan.

Hacker attacks

The cyber threat has hit public and private subjects in the last year. And the perpetrators of the attacks are both states and criminal organizations or “hacktivists”. The attack techniques were different: malicious software and scripts, useful for espionage, economic return and discrediting of the affected targets. The most significant increase in hacker attacks has been against private individuals with the increasingly massive use of malware, including ransomware. Furthermore, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has created new types of attacks. There is therefore talk of side effects of other actions destined to fall mainly on Ukraine.

While, as far as Italy is concerned, the most frequent attacks have hit the energy, transport and government services chain. The purpose of cyberattacks continues to be to penetrate strategic subjects, such as the institutions of the republic. But, with the war between Russia and Ukraine, the nuclei of “hacktivists” began to coalesce and move towards pro-Russian actions together.

Jihadist terrorism

Then remains the alert on jihadist terrorismalthough in 2022, al Qaida and the Islamic State have both suffered the elimination of their leaders. The past year, says the report, saw the two Islamist groups “delegate ever greater responsibilities to their respective peripheral branches, enhancing their operational projection capacity on a local scale, without however abdicating the original vocation of global jihad. […] There has been marked jihadist activism in numerous quadrants, especially in the Middle East, Afghanistan and, increasingly, in sub-Saharan Africa, which is now the new true epicenter”.

Subversion and extremism (ultra-right and anarcho-insurrectionalism)

With respect to the areas of subversion on the national territory, the intelligence report focused on anarcho-insurrectionaryism. According to the security forces, the anarchist one is the most concrete threat, characterized by militant components determined to promote the struggle through direct and destructive action.

Attention arose above all after the case of the anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito, who under the 41-bis regime began a hunger strike, which is still ongoing. Starting from this story, the garrisons near the prisons or judicial buildings have increased and the marches in support of the anarchist, animated by Italian or foreign acronyms that refer to the subversive core Fai-Fri (informal anarchist federation and international revolutionary front). According to the intelligence, “revolutionary solidarity” acted as an amplifier of the anarchist terrorist network.

Also present in the report is the far right, which is committed to drawing up future strategies in the area to relaunch its presence at the national level. The majority of support for the Russian military intervention in Ukraine has come from the ultra-right. Furthermore, it confirms the danger for the growth of online activism to convince people to join the international networks of suprematism, characterized by theracist imprint and social rancor. This activism is intended to incite a violent response against what these same groups refer to as “the system”.

Organized crime

In front of one significant difficultyaside from the traditional mafiasin the implementation of wide-ranging criminal strategies, mostly ascribable to the pressing law enforcement action, the intelligence evidence shows how the business-criminal threat, attributable to the work of a broad and articulated sphere of subjects belonging to the so-called “gray area” (criminal exponents, colluded entrepreneurs, unfaithful public officials, professional facilitators), is able to carry out considerable interference in the healthy economic fabric, in an attempt to acquire or maintain undue competitive advantage positions and intercept substantial public financial resources. Vulnerability, says the document, depends a lot on the current national socio-economic context, marked by the effects of the concomitant health and energy crises, which are affected not only by the instabilities of the scenario deriving from the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict, but also by the consequences of climate change, which contribute to making our territory more “fragile”. “From this point of view – reads the report – priority attention was paid to the efficiency of the projects linked to the National Recovery and Resilience Planespecially in relation to the risk that insidious parasitic interference, by various economic actors, could act as a barrier to economic recovery humiliating the country’s ambitious modernization strategies.”