From attacking political opponents to false reports on top managers, up to the hunt for talkative employees and spying on entrepreneurs, professionals and ordinary employees. If the vermin of Striano & Co was preparing dossiers against the centre-right in order to hit enemies with journalistic investigations, the Milan hacker network did not have a specific target, but acted on commission and had been sneaking into everyone’s life for two years. And in order to please the client, who paid tens of thousands of euros per file, he was capable of falsifying the reports, even for blackmail or extortion purposes. This is the picture that emerges from the investigation by the Milan DDA, which led to the issuance of six precautionary measures and the defeat of the organisation, accused of criminal association aimed at unauthorized access to a computer system and other serious crimes. An investigation that “allows us to start connecting some dots” to “understand the functioning of a gigantic market for confidential information”, said the national anti-mafia and anti-terrorism prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, in the press conference on the investigation that led to house arrest four people with electronic bracelets, including Carmine Gallo, the former Anti-Mafia super policeman who also investigated the murder of Maurizio Gucci, and the registration of the president of the Fiera Milano Foundation, Enrico Pazzali, in the register of suspects, of Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio and the banker Matteo Arpe, as well as the issuing of warrants for a policeman on duty at the Rho police station and a finance marshal employed at the Dia in Lecce.
The dossier system was apparently conceived and implemented by Pazzali and Gallo, partners of Equalizer, the investigation company which, thanks to the collaboration of disloyal state servants and professional hackers, carried out unauthorized access to databases to extract covered files secret and insert them into reports created with the information illegally exfiltrated, but disguised in the form of journalistic news, to hide the illicit origin of the data collected. Not just abusive intrusions into analyst systems. The criminal association, in order to satisfy customers, also offered the installation of equipment aimed at intercepting communications, as would have happened in the Del Vecchio dossier, with the insertion of a Trojan into the mobile phone of his girlfriend, the actress Jessica Ann Serfaty. And again, the spies “fraudulently and clandestinely” carried out video and audio recordings of conversations and private meetings between those present and intercepted communications. Among the exfiltrated data there is information covered by secrecy, such as criminal investigations to help clients, especially private individuals and law firms, to evade judicial investigations.
A system so professionally designed and organized that it led the criminal group to “hold” the country. “We screw all of Italy,” said the suspect Nunzio Calamucci, the private investigator who had designed the “Beyond” platform, with which dossiers were shared with customers, and who managed “the kids”, the group of hackers did not yet identified. For the investigators, Pazzali, who continually asked for dossiers to be made, was with Gallo at the top of the association, so much so that the affiliates of the group, which has over fifty suspects, referred to him as “handsome uncle”, “the boss », «the President». It is no coincidence that the data stolen from the systems would also have been used “to damage the image of Pazzali’s professional and entrepreneurial competitors” or to target “Pazzali’s political opponents” or “people linked to him”. Finally, from the interceptions it emerges that the spies aimed at the “direct violation of the IT structures” of the country, said the Milan prosecutor, Marcello Viola. “An alarming picture”, according to Melillo, who explained how the “system of attacks on national cyber security” has never been “organically explored”.
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