Italian Foreign Ministry’s Website Restored After Hacker Attack - 1

Image by DC Studio, from Freepik

Italian Foreign Ministry’s Website Restored After Hacker Attack

  • Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
  • Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor

The website of Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is back online following a cyberattack, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani confirmed on Sunday, as reported by the local news agency ANSA .

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • Hackers targeted public-facing portals, sparing critical IT systems.
  • Milan airports’ websites disrupted, flight operations unaffected.
  • Hacker group NoName057(16) claimed responsibility.

The attack, announced on Friday, had rendered the websites of the Foreign Ministry and Milan’s Linate Airport inaccessible, while the Malpensa Airport site experienced intermittent functionality, as reported by the local news outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano (FQ).

Reuters explains that iIn these types of attacks, known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), involve hackers flooding a network with overwhelming data traffic to disrupt its functionality.

According to an earlier report by ANSA , the attack targeted only public-facing portals rather than the entire IT system, resulting in limited disruptions, such as the inability to check flight arrivals and departures, without affecting the overall operation of the airports.

The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057(16) claimed responsibility for the attack in a Telegram post, stating they had targeted several sites, including those of the Foreign Ministry and the two Milan airports. Unlike other pro-Russian groups, NoName057(16) operates independently, using a custom-made DDoSia toolkit, as noted by The Record .

While the Foreign Ministry’s website was quickly restored, the airport sites faced greater challenges, causing disruptions for travelers seeking information. However, there were no reported impacts on air traffic, says FQ. Additionally, Medium noted that the airports’ mobile apps stayed operational despite the website outages.

“This is the third cyberattack in three days,” Minister Tajani stated during a Senate session, as reported by FQ.

He also announced that he had instructed the Ministry’s Secretary-General to initiate reforms, including the establishment of a dedicated Directorate-General for cybersecurity and AI, as reported by FQ.

DeepSeek Unveils 3V Model, The Most Powerful Open-Source AI Yet - 2

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

DeepSeek Unveils 3V Model, The Most Powerful Open-Source AI Yet

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
  • Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released its latest open-source model, DeepSeek-V3, this week. The startup claims that its new large model includes 671B parameters and can perform better than frontier models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude-Sonnet-3.5.

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • DeepSeek released its latest AI model DeepSeek-V3 claiming it performs better than GPT 4o and Claude-Sonnet-3.5.
  • The Chinese AI company explained that the new model includes 671B parameters and it’s three times faster than the previous model.
  • DeepSeek-V3 is now the most powerful open-source AI model in the market

Users can interact with the model through the official website, read the company’s paper , and access the model via Hugging Face. DeekSeek said this new model is three times faster than the previous version released in November and has enhanced capacities and API compatibility.

🚀 Introducing DeepSeek-V3! Biggest leap forward yet: ⚡ 60 tokens/second (3x faster than V2!) 💪 Enhanced capabilities 🛠 API compatibility intact 🌍 Fully open-source models & papers 🐋 1/n pic.twitter.com/p1dV9gJ2Sd — DeepSeek (@deepseek_ai) December 26, 2024

“We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token,” wrote the company on GitHub . “Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models.”

Many users, organizations, and companies have congratulated DeepSeek on its achievement. “Congratulations on the stellar release!” wrote Hugging Face on X , “The model checkpoints and a detailed report – truly Christmas is here!”

Andrej Karpathy —former researcher at OpenAI and head of AI at Tesla—shared a few thoughts too. “DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M).”

DeepSeek-V3 is now one of the strongest open-source AI models in the market and its paid API remains among the most affordable in the market.