Italy’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) has issued an urgent alert on Monday to raise awareness about the high risk of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against national entities.
“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,” explained the public alert.
The signs are posts from the Killnet group’s Telegram channel that alluded to ‘massive and unprecedented’ attacks against Italy.
Killnet is a pro-Russian hacktivist group that hit Italy with a cyberattack two weeks ago. The group used an old but effective DDoS attack method known as Slow HTTP.
Killnet announced “Operation Panopticon” last week, calling for 3,000 “cyber fighters” to volunteer in 72 hours. The group then repeated the call to action several times later during the same week.
The sign-up form asked volunteers about their system, origin, age, and Telegram account and provided the required tools to launch resource-depletion attacks.
On Monday, Killnet gave an etymological explanation of the word Panopticon on Telegram while using data leak innuendos and warning that 90% of the country’s officials ‘will go crazy.’
Killnet is targeting Italian organizations because Italy has supported Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s invasion.
This sparked a response from Anonymous Italy, who hit Killnet with cyberattacks and doxxed some of its members by publishing photos on social media. In turn, Killnet struck back at the organization.
According to local media reports, the online portals of the State Police and the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense appeared unresponsive on Monday. Reportedly, the sites of the two ministries appeared to have been hit by DDoS attacks.