The ransomware economy is estimated to be worth $ 20 billion annually. This is what emerges from the investigation into ‘cyber warfare’ which closed the autumn cycle of “Direct Presa”, according to which, moreover, in 2021, 74% of the ransoms in cryptocurrencies ended up in Russia. Large companies and entire countries have ended up in the sights of digital bandits. The journalists of Presa Diretta went to Ireland to see how the pirates managed to disable the National Health Service, while in Italy the Health of the Lazio Region was attacked. But cyber warfare also passes through hybrid wars between hostile countries, which organize and launch real cyberattacks against their rivals, to weaken them, destabilize them: Direct Presa reconstructs, for example, the incredible cyber attack suffered last July by Albania , when 90% of the country’s public services were paralyzed for several days. A separate chapter is dedicated to infowar, the propaganda war, which for months has been manipulating, modifying, inventing, to influence public opinion also on the war in Ukraine with the power of Telegram and Tik Tok and the factories of Russian trolls; social networks that fuel the polarization of opinions; the mechanisms that act on our psyche and make someone more susceptible to misinformation than others. As Riccardo Iacona’s broadcast tells us, Italy also participates in the monitoring and unveiling of fakes. Walter Quattrociocchi, professor of computer science at Sapienza, for example, leads the research team of the Roman university that studies the processes of dissemination of information and disinformation, while Luisa Verdoliva, telecommunications professor at the Federico II of Naples in the front line against i ‘deepfake’, directs several multimedia forensic projects with the aim of devising technologies capable of identifying modified images and videos and also collaborates with the Pentagon.
