Security News > 2022 > May > Italy warns organizations to brace for incoming DDoS attacks
"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," explains the public alert.
The signs are posts from the Killnet group's Telegram channel that incited to 'massive and unprecedented' attacks against Italy.
Killnet is a pro-Russian hacktivist group that attacked Italy two weeks ago, using an old but still effective DDoS method known as 'Slow HTTP'. As such, the defensive actions proposed by CSIRT this time are associated with this type of attack but also include various generic pieces of advice on good security practices.
While DDoS seems to be the primary goal, it could be that Killnet plans to use DDoS to force defenders to deal with service disruptions instead of remediating active cyberattacks.
Killnet targeting Italian organizations is the result of the group recent targeting of entities in several countries, Italy among them, for supporting Ukraine's resistance against Russia.
The agency has told la Repubblica that this outage wasn't caused by Killnet attacks but due to a software upgrade that didn't go as planned.