ROME. Schools across Italy were evacuated on Wednesday after about 6,300 of them received emailed bomb warnings, according to Reuters, in the latest of a series of mass hoax threats and cyberattacks that have disrupted everyday life across Europe.
The messages reached nearly 6,300 of Italy’s roughly 7,900 public school groups, according to authorities in Rome cited by Le Monde. In many places classes were evacuated and students were sent home, and bomb disposal squads were deployed in some areas. The email seen by Reuters was signed “Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan,” a name and title authorities treat as fabricated. The same purported author had claimed responsibility for emailed bomb threats sent on Friday to newsrooms in Ireland and Bulgaria, Reuters reported.
Italy was not the only country hit on Wednesday. Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland said many of their schools received a similar email threat from abroad, which was classed as a hoax and did not disrupt classes, according to Reuters. Le Monde reported that hundreds of schools in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland received messages titled “Death is near” and signed “Red Owl.” Northern Ireland’s education minister, Paul Givan, said the threats should be given no credibility, and police said the sender was outside the country.
No device was reported found in any of the schools, and authorities in the three countries said they believed there was no real risk to the public. But a hoax on this scale does damage without any explosives: a school day lost for millions of students, emergency services pulled to hundreds of scenes at once, and parents left to guess whether a threat against their own child’s school is the real one. Police still have to treat every site as a possible scene until it is cleared, which is the point of the tactic.
The school threats are part of a wider pattern. Reuters described them as the latest in a series of threats and cyberattacks around Europe against supermarkets, blood banks, air traffic systems and broadcasters. Investigators have not publicly attributed the campaign to a state or a group, and the shifting signatures, the spoofed addresses described by Le Monde, and the spread across unrelated sectors are consistent with a disruption campaign designed to be cheap to run and expensive to answer.
What happens next is partly technical and partly a judgment call that every European school system now has to make in advance: how to check a threat fast enough that a hoax cannot empty thousands of classrooms, without ever waving through the one message that is real. Italian authorities were still working through the origin of Wednesday’s emails, and police in Ireland and Britain said their inquiries into the messages sent from abroad were continuing.
