Just to stay in the last few weeks: hackers Noname057(16), in full mobilization of tractors, launch a series of cyber attacks against Italian sites "in support of farmers who are protesting tired of the wrong policies of the Italian authorities, who sponsor the criminal regime of Zelensky".
Days later, Vladimir Putin has a friendly exchange with an Italian student who makes the rounds in the media;
in interviews the young woman says that "the story of illiberal, dictatorial Russia is a construction of the West".
And again: it is an Italian site, 'Il Correspondente', which informs of the death in Spain of the Russian deserter pilot Maxim Kuzminov.
All pieces of Moscow's hybrid campaign against Italy, which raises the level as the European elections in June approach.
The intelligence community is well aware of the alarm and dedicates ample space to the topic in its 2023 report illustrated in the services headquarters in Piazza Dante in the presence of the Authority delegated to the security of the Republic, Alfredo Mantovano, of the directors of the Agencies, Elisabetta Belloni ( Dis), Giovanni Caravelli (Aise) and Mario Parente (Aisi) and the president of Copasir, Lorenzo Guerini.
Russia is the most active country (followed by China), we read in the document, in hybrid campaigns "to the detriment of Italy and the entire West", through espionage, cyber attacks, disinformation, destabilizing exploitation of migratory flows.
Moscow has also tried to hinder Italian and European initiatives for energy diversification and the introduction of the price cap on Russian gas with propaganda "aimed at polluting information for the general public about the trend in energy prices".
The intelligence's attention is now turned to the upcoming events that will catalyze disinformation campaigns: the European elections in June, the Italian presidency of the G7, the exit from the Silk Road.
The director of Dis Belloni recalled that this year as many as "76 countries, equal to half the world population, will vote and there are risks of interference and conditioning of the electoral processes through the hybrid threat".
And Mantovano assured that the guard is high.
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