After a few weeks of silence and a troubled season, the hackers have returned to attack our country.
A first tranche of offensives began in August last year with the sensational hacking of the Lazio region. For which the president of the Region Zingaretti had spoken of the “most serious cyber offensive ever occurred in our country”.
More recently, during this spring, ransomware attacks have given way to a series of offensives that are more demonstrative than downright dangerous. Which have targeted various Italian institutions, and which above all had their origin in Russia.
The creator of these DdOS attacks, which send a system into a tailspin due to access overload but do not involve the theft of data, was in fact the Killnet group. That is a collective of young Russian hackers ideologically close to the Kremlin.
And now, after a truce, here we go again: the Twitter profile of the Mite has been hacked.
Let’s find out who and how he violated the profile of the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
Hacked the profile of the Mite
The Twitter profile of the Mite has been hacked.
For a few hours, the image of the Russian Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency in the world by capitalization, appeared on the official profile of the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
Not only that: on the night between Wednesday 14 and Thursday 15 September, the account of the Mite shared a tweet in English, with the name Vitalik.eth, which is precisely Buterin’s name on Twitter.
Further curiosity: the violation took place in the hours in which the Ethereum Merge took place. In other words, the change in the algorithms of the blockchain, which will allow a much more ecological and less expensive mining of cryptocurrencies from an energy point of view.
Who is the hacker?
There is a good chance that the hackers have tried – in those passing hours – to carry out cryptocurrency scams, by sending links behind which are hidden malware.
Of course, the hypothesis that it really is Vitalik Buterin, a young Russian programmer (born in 1994) founder of Ethereum, must be ruled out. And he was the winner in 2014, just twenty, of the World Technology Award for the creation of Ethereum.
On the contrary: the profile of Buterin himself was hacked in the same hours. In a fake tweet, the programmer promised to give away 50 thousand Ether (worth about 100 million euros), referring to links probably connected to malicious software.
One would think that the hackers are again Russian. And that Buterin was “punished” for having expressed profound dissent on several occasions against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Alarm returned
The ministry confirmed the attack, which has now returned without damage. And on the hacked twitter profile, the Mite eliminated Buterin’s image.
During the same hours, the Twitter profile of ISPI, the Institute for International Political Studies, was also violated. Also in this case, the alarm returned in the late morning of today, September 15th.
The postal police are investigating both cases.
The previous
The Mite (but the official website and not the Twitter profile) had already been targeted last April. Even if at the time the down was commented on this way by the head of the department, Roberto Cingolani: “Safety is the number one priority. As I speak to you, in addition to energy security, I can tell you that we have external threats detected on the Ministry’s IT network and as a precaution we have had to suspend the operation of all the Ministry’s IT systems. So safety is the first parameter to keep in mind, energy security and more. “
The irony of Angelo Bonelli
The irony of Angelo Bonelli, co-spokesperson for Europa Verde, is addressed to Minister Cingolani. Who reported the hacking of the Twitter profile of the Mite at 9.30 this morning with this twitter: “Does Minister Cingolani know that the Twitter profile of the Transition ministry has been conquered by the Russian programmer Vitalik? What’s now? Shall we let the Russians do the politics of ecological transition? “
The expert’s comment
Gianluca Grossi, editor-in-chief of Criptovaluta.it, commented on the episode as follows: “A modus operandi that is typical of groups of scammers who exploit the popularity of cryptocurrencies which in the past had already made famous victims, but not at the level of institutional accounts of the Italian Republic: the official Twitter account of the Ministry of Ecological Transition is also at the expense, with hackers who are exploiting the popularity of the passage to spread their own scams.
The merge of Ethereum, the passage that leads the second cryptocurrency in the world by capitalization to reduce its emissions and energy consumption by more than 99%, has also been an opportunity for scammers to circulate their systems. A worrying situation on two fronts: the first is that of the IT security of the accounts of the most important institutions in our country, the second the number of people who, following the advice of an impersonator who has come into possession of an institutional account with 120,000 followers, will be scammed. “