On Monday, Italy's Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) issued an urgent warning about the significant threat of cyberattacks against national entities.
The Italian organisation is referring to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) cyberattack, which may not be catastrophic but can nonetheless cause financial and other harm due to service failures and interruptions.
“There continue to be signs and threats of possible imminent attacks against, in particular, national public entities, private entities providing a public utility service or private entities whose image is identified with the country of Italy,” describes the public alert.
The indicators are Telegram postings from the Killnet organisation inciting massive and unprecedented assaults on Italy.
Killnet is a pro-Russian hacktivist group that launched an attack on Italy two weeks ago, employing an ancient but still powerful DDoS technique known as 'Slow HTTP.'
As a result, CSIRT's advised defensive actions this time are related to this sort of assault but also contain numerous generic pieces of advice.
Last Tuesday, Killnet announced "Operation Panopticon," appealing for 3,000 "cyber fighters" to join in 72 hours. Last week, the group restated the call to action multiple times.
The necessary sign-up form requests information on the volunteers' system, origin, age, and Telegram account, as well as the tools needed to launch resource-depletion attacks.
While DDoS appears to be the primary purpose, it is possible that Killnet intends to utilise DDoS to force defences to cope with service outages rather than active cyberattacks.
Killnet presented an etymology definition of the word Panopticon, implying data leaks and warning that 90% of the country's officials will 'go crazy.'
Killnet's recent targeting of entities in numerous countries, Italy among them, for backing Ukraine's resistance against Russia has resulted in the group's targeting of Italian groups.
This prompted Anonymous Italy to take action, launching attacks on Killnet and doxing some of its members via social media. As a result, Killnet retaliated.
The CSIRT Italy website was intermittently inaccessible at the time of writing, but no long-term connection difficulties were observed. There have also been reports of Poste Italiane, Italy's national postal service provider, going down for many hours this morning.
However, the agency told la Repubblica that the disruption was caused by a software upgrade that did not proceed as planned, rather than by Killnet assaults.
Other local media sources that regularly monitor the availability of Italian sites claim that the web portals of the State Police and the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense are also unavailable.
At the time of writing, the sites of the two ministries appear to have been damaged by a DDoS assault, according to BleepingComputer.
