School Bomb Alerts: 'Hard to Find Who's Behind Them', Says IT Writer Danilo Cimino
For IT writer Danilo Cimino the bomb-threat emails exploited no 'electronic fragility' but a lack of digital literacy: behind the wave there could be 'a foreign power or even kids', and tracing the authors will be very hard.
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For IT writer Danilo Cimino, interviewed by the DIRE agency, the wave of bomb-threat emails to Italian schools stems not from an electronic vulnerability but from a lack of digital literacy. He does not commit on who is responsible: it could be 'a foreign power or even kids', and tracing the authors is very hard because whoever sends can cover their tracks. His proposal is to train those who read the inbox with a checklist of keywords and unverified senders, and to build a serious digital education programme for the offices running critical services.
According to IT writer Danilo Cimino, the wave of bomb-threat emails that reached Italian schools did not exploit an 'electronic vulnerability' but a lack of digital literacy. That is what he told the DIRE news agency on November 12: a graduate of the University of Pisa, he has worked with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Cern in Geneva, runs the 'Cose di Computer' education project and has published the book 'Non aprite quella mail!', about phishing, identity theft and the dark web.
Why the emails worked
His reading starts from the protocol, not the text: according to Cimino, when there is a bomb-threat phone call, schools follow a protocol where headteachers alert the police, with everything that follows, including possible evacuation. With emails, he says, 'you cannot react that way', because 'they arrive in a barrage and you have no certainty'. Hence his practical question: who manages the schools' inboxes, and does the spam filter actually work? For the writer there was 'no technological fragility' at all: the problem was 'what came after'.
Who is behind it
Cimino does not commit on the author. 'I cannot know who is behind it,' he said: it could be 'operations set in advance and then carried out by independent cells', with one first mover and other 'would-be hackers' following the model. Behind the wave, he says, there could be 'a foreign power or even kids'. As for tracing the authors, he is blunt: the only way is 'hoping they didn't cover their tracks well', because if an email leaves from Australia and arrives through Taipei, you must ask the mail provider in one country and then the other, and 'what if it happened with the Emirates, where cooperation is harder?'.
The proposal: train the people who read the email
The conclusion of the interview is practical. Cimino says schools need a checklist for the staff who read the inbox, explaining that specific keywords or unverified senders do not on their own justify evacuating a school. More broadly, he says, 'Italy has no serious digital literacy project', and 'we are paying the price' for that gap among the people running offices and critical infrastructure. He adds a point that is psychological rather than technical: a headteacher who receives such a message is understandable in panicking, and some institutions that did not evacuate 'evidently were more familiar with the subject'.
What this piece is, and is not
It is the view of a writer, not an investigation: Cimino names no author and no investigative lead, and his hypotheses are attributed to him throughout. On the same day the network covered the day-two news, with the numbers of the evacuations.