Telecommunications and Internet services in Italy suffered outages on Sunday, according to the National Cybersecurity Agency, as a result of a «massive attack» that also affected other European countries and even North America, the origin of which is unknown.
Italian experts have explained that it could have been a ransomware attack and has identified as a target VMware ESXi servers, which had already shown some vulnerability in other similar incidents in the past, reports the Rai chain.
ACN has already inspected «dozens of systems» that may have been compromised and has urged to undertake updates «immediately» in the case of some servers that have been «exposed» by the attack but could not be traced.
Giorgia Meloni’s government said in a statement that it is following the incident «closely» and has called a meeting for Monday, which will be attended by Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano on behalf of the Prime Minister’s office. The director of the CAN, Roberto Baldoni, and other heads of departments linked to this branch will also attend.
The aim is to «take a first stock of the damage caused» by the cyber-attack and to improve in the field of protection. «In recent weeks, the need to address the vulnerabilities of computer systems had already been the subject of a report by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni,» reads the Executive’s note.
The ‘ransomware’ method, commonly resorted to by hackers and also used in this case, involves blocking the system under the premise of requesting money from the user in exchange for releasing it.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
