Two Italians who launched Cyber Attacks on Mario Draghi- the President of European Central Bank and Two Former Italian Prime Ministers- Matteo Renzi and Mario Monti were arrested by law enforcement authorities yesterday. Reports suggest that the hackers were caught on the basis of the Arrest Warrant issued by Italian authorities from Rome.
At the time of arrest the two Italians, 45-year old Nuclear Engineer Giulio Occhinonero and his 47-year old sister Francesca Maria Occhionero were in an intention to launch an attack on London’s GCHQ and United State’s Department of Defense. It is reported by the authorities that the two were caught red-handedly while inducing snooping software into a government network.
Going deep into the details, the brother and sister pair is accused of setting up a cyber espionage center in their London based home to monitor institutions, government agencies, professionals firms and political big heads.
According to the “Eye Pyramid” investigation, named after the prolonged cyber attacks, it was revealed that the pair used to first send phishing emails to numerous bankers, politicians and law enforcement personalities in Italy. Then they used to round up on few victims and would try to invade their computer networks. After getting access to the data, the two cyber crooks used to transfer that data to servers located in the United States.
Initially, the pair only targeted high profile populace of Italy and then decided to widen their snooping activities to London and to other European Union nations.
The police investigation also disclosed some astonishing facts about some shell companies and websites operating in Italy and abroad that were allegedly used by the bro-sis pair to pull off the scam.
Servers which were used to store critical info from the pair were seized on Monday by FBI who is jointly working on this investigation with the Italian Police from past two weeks.
A report from POLITICO suggests that the two siblings were also being paid by a nation for indulging in such activities. This was revealed from the frozen bank statements of the both brother-sister pair.
FBI is also investigating on the angle of whether the two were acting as state-sponsored actors.
More details are awaited!
