Italy's government says pro-Russian hackers put Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani's personal data on the dark web, and the prime minister is treating the episode as a serious security concern.
Giorgia Meloni made the attribution in a statement carried by the news agency ANSA on Saturday. She described the sale of data belonging to officials as a grave concern. Tajani said on X that the hackers had been spreading his data for days, so the material was circulating well before the government spoke publicly. (The dark web is the part of the internet reachable only through special software, where stolen data is often traded.)
The source gives little beyond that. It does not say what kind of personal data was exposed, how the hackers obtained it, which group is responsible, or what evidence links the leak to Russia. For now, the attribution rests on the government's word.
That gap matters because "pro-Russian hackers" describes a loose set of activist groups, not one actor. Such groups have been tied to attacks on European government websites, typically denial-of-service floods that knock a site offline for a few hours. Exposing a named minister's personal details is a different tactic. It targets a person rather than a server, and unlike a downed website, leaked data cannot be restored once it is out.
The open question is whether Rome will name a group or publish evidence for the Russia link, which would show whether this is activist noise or something more organized.