Two Hackers in Jail over Alleged Attack on Italian Elite

An Italian sister-brother duo, Francesca Maria Occhionero (49) and Giulio Occhionero (45) is now inside separate prisons in Italy after authorities arrested them over an alleged high-profile security breach, reports AP.

It's said that the hackers reached out to data from a number of targets, important of them Matteo Renzi, erstwhile prime minister of Italy, Mario Draghi, European Central Bank president, many erstwhile officials belonging to Italy's tax police, as well as one Vatican cardinal. A huge total of 18,000 usernames along with 1,800 passwords apparently got accessed too.

As per court filings, the hackers tried invading Renzi's account twice in 2016 -once on 12th June and again on 30th June, while they targeted Draghi June 23rd the day United Kingdom passed referendum to separate from EU.

The suspects possibly attacked the Bank-of-Italy as well as politicians from Italy's parliament. Court documents described the said politicians as London inhabitants domiciled inside capital Rome.

Giulio's lawyer in an interview to the Financial Times said his client hadn't carried out any illegal act as well as that he was the owner of a few servers inside USA as he ran a business in that country. Francesca's attorney couldn't be reached. Theguardian.com posted this, January 10, 2017.

In a LinkedIn profile apparently of Francesca Maria Occhionero, she and her brother Giulio together founded Westlands Securities a company in London during 2001. In 2014, however, that company was closed. The LinkedIn profile described the company as one private firm which serviced financial advice for banks and which afterwards associated itself with private equity and real estate.

Investigation for the alleged hack got started when one security expert started suspecting things on getting one e-mail from someone posing as a lawyer, which actually contained malware. The expert contacted Italian police regarding the matter. Subsequently, the investigation was carried on for 8 months that according to Di Legami led to the confiscation of the servers; not only that the so-called "drop zones" situated all over USA too were seized.

Arrests of the suspects were aided with FBI's help working in close coordination with Italian officials to solve the case.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/17/2017