A cyberattack on Saturday disrupted approximately ten official websites in Italy, including those of the Foreign Ministry and Milan’s Linate and Malpensa airports.
The attack, which temporarily disabled access to the sites, was claimed by the pro-Russian hacker group Noname057(16) on Telegram. The group justified the attack as a “well-deserved cyber response” to what they called Italy’s “Russophobic” stance.
Italy’s cybersecurity agency confirmed that the attack was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault, a method where hackers overwhelm networks with excessive data traffic to paralyze their operations. The agency responded swiftly, assisting the targeted organizations and mitigating the attack’s effects in under two hours.
Despite the disruption to the websites, operations at Milan’s airports remained unaffected. A spokesperson for SEA, the company managing Linate and Malpensa, assured that flights were not impacted and that the airports’ mobile apps continued functioning normally during the incident.
This attack is part of a broader trend of politically motivated cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure and government institutions. As tensions between Russia and Western nations persist, such incidents highlight the importance of robust cybersecurity measures to protect vital services from digital threats.
