Risk of hacker attacks from Russia on Italian institutional sites. The alarm of the cyber agency

The National Cybersecurity Agency has identified an increase in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by hacktivist groups – according to open sources, of Russian origin – against national institutional subjects. However, it does not appear that the attacks – which currently appear to be of a “demonstrative” nature – have affected the integrity and confidentiality of the information and systems concerned. The Bcc itself made it known in a note.

The Agency monitors “with the utmost attention the operations of the institutional sites – ministries, authorities, agencies, constitutional bodies, etc. – and of the organizations that manage essential services for the community, also in relation to recent events which have produced a brief unavailability of one of these institutional sites in the last weekend”. According to what is learned, it would be the site of the Ministry of Agriculture which was attacked last Saturday. The mitigation action, the body says, “promptly adopted techniques of dynamic geographic segregation of traffic to discourage attackers”.

Between groups of hackers in action there would be the Russian crew ‘No name 057 (16)’, created last March and protagonist of a series of attacks against government entities and critical infrastructures of Ukraine and countries that support the country attacked by Moscow, in particular Poland, Lithuania , Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Norway and Finland.

The National Cybersecurity Agency continues its activity of monitoring and mitigating IT incidents, publishing alert communications and technical bulletins on its corporate website (csirt.gov.it). It is appropriate, underlines the body, “that organizations promptly report to Acn any suspicious activity and any identified attack, providing any useful element”.

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