The pro-Russian hacker group, killnet, had threatened him on Telegram: on May 30 at 5.00 an irreparable attack on Italy will start. In fact, our country in the last 24 hours has been targeted by the group that has launched a massive attack never experienced before. Our most representative structure was attacked, the National Cybersecurity Agency, a Ddos type attack, of a demonstrative nature and not to do serious damage. Our technicians, writes Repubblica, for ten hours had to counter the amount of data that the Russians, at three different times of the day, launched trying to flood the systems to erode resources and block the IT infrastructure: they did not succeed, so much so that the same Killnet hackers wrote on Telegram: “The specialists who work in this organization are excellent. We have done thousands of attacks and at the moment we see that these guys are good professionals! Italian Government, we advise you to increase the salary of several thousand dollars to this team. CSIRT Accept my respects, gentlemen! ”.
Our specialists reported that after a first offensive that began on 12 May, the Russians of Killnet announced a new attack on Italy. Up to now they have attacked the websites of companies and institutions, trying to paralyze their services. In at least two cases, however, they also tried to steal data: the police managed to avoid the intrusion into their databases while it is not yet clear whether they managed to enter those of the Ministry of the Interior. However, the Rome prosecutor's office is investigating this and has opened a file for terrorism.
The Russians then returned to the charge in recent days announcing an attack between 29 and 30 May. There was therefore an assault on the portal of our cyber agency. From what Repubblica is able to reconstruct, the attack lasted more than 10 hours. And it was by far one of the most powerful ever seen in Italy. The hackers used computers, previously compromised by them, which were located in 80 different countries to download traffic to the Italian site: the peaks detected were 40 Gbps.
The choice to attack from many different nations was dictated by the desire to make defense more difficult: our men had to insert filters from time to time thanks to which traffic arriving from a foreign country rather than another is inhibited. For the technicians these are not too complex maneuvers but in cases like these they must be carried out quickly if we want to avoid, as we have managed to do, that at least in Italy the site ends up offline.
Experts claim that Killnet will hit again and that the assault on the Agency was a diversion to be able to enter other servers.