Rome:Taipei A Taiwan university's alumni email account was allegedly compromised to send bomb threat emails to more than 6,000 public schools across Italy, as reported by Italian media. The threats, which led to evacuations, were sent on Wednesday morning local time.
According to Focus Taiwan, Taiwan's representative office in Italy stated on Wednesday night that Taiwan condemns any threatening behavior. Relevant Taiwanese agencies and organizations have expressed their willingness to cooperate with Italian authorities by providing technical assistance in the investigation.
Screenshots of the emails, published by Italian media, showed that the threats were sent from an account under the domain of Dayeh University in Taiwan. The account displayed the name "Liu Fang-chun" in traditional Chinese characters. Dayeh University, a private institution in Changhua County, reported that an initial investigation indicated that an alumnus' email account had been hacked to send the emails. The university has since suspended the account while the investigation into the incident and the identity of the actual sender continues.
Despite the emails appearing to originate from a Taiwan account, they were signed with a Russian name, Mikhail Andropov, who claimed to lead a virtual group called "Vilayat di Misoginistan." The emails warned that bombs equipped with remote detonators had been placed in the schools. This led multiple schools to urgently evacuate students and notify parents for immediate pickup.
A Taiwanese woman in Rome, identified by her surname Liao, shared that her daughter was evacuated from her high school without the chance to retrieve her phone from the classroom. The situation was described as chaotic, with armed police arriving shortly after and finding no explosives.
In some instances, schools did not fully evacuate. Chen I-wen, a former head of the Taiwanese Community in Italy, mentioned that his child waited outside the school for about an hour before classes resumed once safety was confirmed.
Italian police and cybersecurity experts suspect that hackers may have hijacked university servers in Taiwan or used spoofed email addresses in a relay attack, as per local media. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that no explosives were found and that the threats were meant to instill fear, waste time, and create chaos and uncertainty. The incident is seen as part of a broader pattern of hybrid warfare targeting Europe, with other disruptions reported in France.
