On May 7, the Colonial Pipeline, a company that transports oil and fuel to the southern states on the east coast of the United States, was the victim of a hacker attack. A software has taken over the computer network, blocking it. In return, the hackers demanded a ransom, in bitcoin, of nearly $ 5 million. It was the largest attack on an oil network in the United States. After a five-day hiatus, the Colonial Pipeline paid the ransom and the kidnappers freed the computers and kept about 100 gigabytes of data. Four days later, the Irish health system suffered two cyber attacks of the same type, with a ransom demand (this time 20 million dollars): one directed at the Ministry of Health, the other at the network of hospitals: attacks defined as “catastrophic” by the government that five days later he revealed that the kidnappers would have handed over the computer keys to free the computers without any ransom. These two episodes so close together tell us clearly how much the danger threshold on the internet has risen: could our hospitals, even our energy infrastructures, be successfully attacked by digital kidnappers? Yes of course. In Italy, public administration data and operating systems are scattered across over eleven thousand servers, often obsolete and with outdated protection. I’m too easy a target. For this the announcement made yesterday at the inauguration of Italian Tech by Minister Vittorio Colao it is so important: by 2022 there will be a single national cloud, a safe, armored place to host all the data of the public administration. We have been talking about it for a decade but this time we are there for at least a couple of reasons: there is the money from the Recovery Plan to finance the data migration; and there is a clear technological strategy, which is to use the best suppliers, even from Silicon Valley if necessary, but applying the strict rules on the protection of personal data in force in Europe. It is an obligatory path: from digital you cannot go back for all too obvious reasons, but to move forward you need to protect yourself. A successful digital transition also involves well-organized cybersecurity.
.