Hackers publish Italian Foreign Minister Tajani's data on the darknet; the Brenner Base Tunnel project company also attacked

Minister's data on the darknet

Italy's Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani said that his personal data has been circulating on the darknet for several days, and that attackers are looking for additional information and offering payment for details about him and his relatives. He wrote about this on X; the outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, cited by the Russian-language version of Euronews, links the attack to the Russian hacker group Noname057(16). According to the outlet, Rome's chief prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi and the head of cybercrime policing Ivano Gabrielli were also among the victims.

Reactions from Tajani and Meloni

Tajani named Italy's position on Ukraine as the political reason for the attack: 'defending the freedom of a sovereign state... has become dangerous for these criminal structures.' He said he would not allow himself to be intimidated and recalled that, starting January 1, he had created a 'cyber unit' at the Foreign Ministry to protect against intrusions by actors 'often in one way or another connected with state structures hostile to us.' Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in a statement on Saturday, expressed solidarity with the minister, calling the sale of confidential information about civil servants 'a serious concern' that 'must be stopped with maximum determination.' She also criticized the opposition for spreading 'fake images' — referring to a photo shared by Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein... actually Stefano Bonaccini: it shows Tajani wearing a red MAGA cap. After the prime minister's statement, Bonaccini deleted the post, stressing that the meme was ironic and that Tajani 'held the cap in his hands at public events, which is widely documented.'

Attack on the Brenner Base Tunnel project company

In the same days, it became known about a separate cyberattack on BBT SE — the company building the 55-kilometer Brenner railway tunnel between Innsbruck in Austria and Fortezza in Italy. The company confirmed that the incident occurred on October 17: the affected systems were 'immediately isolated,' and external cybersecurity specialists were brought in for forensic analysis. According to available information, non-public data was stolen through a network connected to the internet. The newspaper Tiroler Tageszeitungwas the first to report the attack; according to its information, initial checks point to the pro-Russian hacker group Everest — that is, a different group from the one that, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano, stands behind the leak of Tajani's data. A connection between the two incidents has not been confirmed in any of the publications.