Nunzia Ciardi: ‘Online attacks cause enormous damage. AI has made everything more complicated’
Translated from Italian and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.
At a glance
Interview
Named sources
Context piece
- Nunzia Ciardi, deputy director of Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency, says hybrid warfare increasingly blurs the line between cybercrime, espionage and state-backed attacks.
- She warns that bots can spread false or distorted claims on social media, exploiting emotions such as indignation, curiosity and fear.
- Ciardi says countering such campaigns is difficult because they can overlap with protections for freedom of expression and information.
“Online attacks cause enormous damage. AI has made everything more complicated.” With that warning, Nunzia Ciardi, deputy director of Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency and former head of the postal police, describes a digital threat that is becoming harder to identify and contain.
Online attacks cause enormous damage. AI has made everything more complicated.
Ciardi says hybrid warfare is increasingly difficult to classify because different forms of hostile activity now overlap. An attack on a hospital, oil pipeline or water system could be ordinary criminal activity aimed at ransom, espionage, an assault by a hostile state, or criminal activity tolerated or sponsored by an unfriendly government.
The danger is not limited to attacks on essential infrastructure. Ciardi says hybrid warfare also involves making it difficult to understand what is happening and spreading distorted information that damages the free formation of public opinion. She describes this as an attack on the circulation of ideas and on people’s will, polluted by disinformation messages and campaigns.
When we live in turbulent historical contexts like these, hybrid warfare increasingly becomes a phenomenon we will have to deal with.
Social media provides a straightforward example, she says. Bots can distribute inaccurate messages and news, then provoke debates around invented or distorted claims. Those campaigns can target sensitive subjects by stimulating indignation, curiosity or fear. Users then join a debate that has already been contaminated at its source, allowing the disinformation to sustain itself.
The most obvious example is social media used to fuel debates about invented or distorted news.
Ciardi says the response is difficult because such activity can fall into a legally uncertain area involving freedom of expression and information. She also warns that citizens can be drawn into AI-generated debates that capture their attention and target people whose interests algorithms have already identified, without them realizing that their views may be distorted.
It is not simple.
About this summary
Originally published by Corriere della Sera in Italian. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.
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