Cyberattack on Trieste Free Port as “NATO Bastion”
Italian port facilities have been targeted because “they are no longer considered neutral, for they are involved in the military transport trade and in U.S. plans to turn them into NATO strongholds”
Over the weekend, from Saturday the 11th to Sunday the 12th of January, several cyberattacks were recorded on the online portals of Italian institutions, including the port of Trieste, which has seen heavy movements of NATO military equipment in recent months, violating its status as a “neutral and demilitarized international free port.”
The first to announce the attack on Telegram were hackers, presumably pro-Russian, from the group Noname057(16) (pictured), who also hit Sinfomar, an IT tool for managing the movement of ships, vehicles, and goods, as well as the websites of some Italian banks accused by the hackers of “financial support for the arms trade.”
Then, on Sunday morning, there were new hacker attacks, reported on Telegram by the Palestinian group Alixsec, which on Sunday again attacked banks, companies, and websites of Italian ports, among which, in addition to Trieste, were also the port facilities in Taranto.
As is often the case, it seems DDoS (denial of service) attacks, i.e. denial of IT services offered by a site, making it impossible to use, come from a variety of sources. According to the Eastern Adriatic Port System Authority, a cyberattack has caused the website of the Port of Trieste to disappear in several countries around the world.
As the Italian Trieste daily newspaper Il Piccolo writes, the motive is “the support of NATO and the Italian government in supplying arms to Ukraine” and “the intention of the United States to turn the port of Trieste into a military bastion.” As Pluralia has repeatedly noted, support for the southeastern flank of the North Atlantic Alliance will be provided through the Cotton Road and Three Seas projects, which, under the guise of commercial initiatives, allegedly conceal strategic military targets of an offensive nature.
“The first terrible results appear,” Il Piccolo finally writes, “the transformation into a legitimate military target. As proof of this, the ports of Genoa and Venice have not been attacked.”