Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven will discuss recent cyberattacks suspected to have come from pro-Russian groups when they meet in Paris on Monday and Tuesday, Italy's foreign minister said on Sunday.
The French foreign ministry building on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris, where the G7 foreign ministers will meet. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
A minister's data on the dark web
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot had accepted his proposal to place the issue on the agenda for the two-day meeting. "Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow we will be discussing it," Tajani said, according to Reuters.
The move follows an attack on Tajani himself. On Saturday, the Italian minister said his personal data had been published on the dark web by what he said were pro-Russian hackers, adding that the move was linked to the Italian government's support for Ukraine. Tajani stopped short of directly blaming the Russian government for the attacks.
Cyberattacks join the agenda
The G7 groups the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada, and its foreign ministers' meetings are a regular forum for coordinating responses to shared security threats. Putting cyberattacks on the formal agenda signals that the governments see the recent incidents as a collective problem rather than a series of isolated national ones.
The Paris meeting comes as European governments have grown increasingly concerned about cyber operations linked to the war in Ukraine. Italy is one of Kyiv's supporters in Europe, and Tajani tied the leak of his data directly to that support. The ministers are expected to discuss how the group can respond jointly, though no specific measures have been announced.
What happens next
The meeting runs Monday and Tuesday in Paris. Any joint statement on cyber security would come after the talks conclude, and it remains unclear whether the ministers will name any group or government as responsible. For now, the episode has put a spotlight on a quieter front of the Ukraine war: the targeting of the officials and institutions backing Kyiv, far from the battlefield.
Sources: Reuters.