When infrastructure becomes a target

This past week, Italy's civilian infrastructure has been tested in ways that go beyond the usual friction of travel and governance. A Dublin-to-Rome flight diverted to a French airbase. The Foreign Minister's personal data shared online by hackers claiming retaliation for Ukraine support. Prime Minister Meloni's statement that civilian infrastructure is "under attack" was not hyperbole but a recognition of a new kind of exposure. According to Deutsche Welle and the New York Times, some 30 European flights were disrupted by bomb threats—most of them hoaxes—yet the disruption was real, the frustration genuine, the cost measurable.

What strikes the international press is not the novelty of such threats but their ordinariness now. The Guardian and France 24 reported that flights to Rome, Warsaw, Madrid and Sofia were all targeted within days. No explosives were found. Yet airports had to respond as though they might be. Travelers were stranded. Airlines absorbed the cost. The system worked as designed—it caught nothing because there was nothing to catch—and yet it failed, because it had to be triggered at all. This is the logic of hybrid warfare: the threat is the disruption.

Italy's position makes it a natural target. It sits at the Mediterranean frontier of Europe, hosts NATO infrastructure, supports Ukraine, and its government is vocal in that support. When hackers claim to strike at the Foreign Minister for Italy's stance on the war, they are not making a random choice. Nor are the bomb threats random: they follow a pattern that experts, according to The Local Italy, trace to far-right Russian groups. Italy is not uniquely vulnerable, but it is visibly exposed—and that visibility itself becomes part of the message.

The deeper question is what happens to ordinary life when the infrastructure that moves people, data and goods becomes a plausible target. We do not yet know who is behind all of this week's threats, and attribution in hybrid warfare is always uncertain. But we know that Italy—like other European states—must now budget for the cost of constant vigilance, and that citizens must absorb the friction of living in a state that is, in Meloni's words, under attack. That is not normal. It should not be accepted as normal.