Hacker attacks: Palazzo Chigi cites them in support of €40 billion of military spending. To protect networks, the State allocates just over €400 million

8 November 2026, 16:13

On the night between 1 and 2 November someone got into the systems that control the refrigerators of several Sicilian supermarkets, going through the call centre that monitors the equipment remotely, and raised the temperatures until the goods were spoiled; in the same days several flights in Europe received hoax bomb alerts. On 6 November, in Verona, the Prime Minister cited attacks like these to answer those who criticise the growth in military spending: "we are not simply talking about weapons", she said, but about "making citizens' everyday lives secure". Against an intruder who came in through a support service, in other words, a spending programme was invoked of which more than two fifths goes on buying weapons.

The argument has substance, and that is precisely why it is worth looking at how seriously the budget takes it. According to estimates by the Mil€x Observatory based on the budget law tables, in 2027 military spending will exceed €40 billion, and €17.2 billion of it will go on producing and buying new weapons, almost a third more than the year before. Adding up instead all the identifiable budget lines for cyber protection, from the budget of the National Cybersecurity Agency to the programmes of the Defence and Foreign ministries, the total only just exceeds €400 million. In the speech, refrigerators come before tanks; in the accounts, for every hundred euros spent on defence, network protection, civilian and military together, receives one.

That much more was needed, the State had already put in writing. In May 2022 the government of the day adopted a National Cybersecurity Strategy that called for 1.2% of gross national investment to be devoted every year to cyber security, about €5 billion, and the funds made available since then have remained far from that target. Today networks receive less than a tenth of the sum judged necessary four years ago; spending on weapons alone, meanwhile, grows by four billion in twelve months, ten times everything cyber protection receives in a year.

At the same press briefing the Prime Minister defended the budget law as the choice to "put the resources where they needed to go", and in the ministries' tables that law even manages to take something away. The Infrastructure Ministry loses all of the €627,830 with which the Motor Vehicle Department, the office that holds the driving licences and number plates of every motorist, was supposed to digitise its services and protect them from attacks. Military spending is paid for by taxpayers, and the share earmarked for new weapons is collected by the companies that build them; the bill for a successful attack, on the other hand, stays with whoever suffers it, like the Sicilian supermarkets that were hit, which threw away the spoiled goods and in the following days were still calculating the damage.

To justify the tanks, it was enough to mention the refrigerators; protecting them from hackers would take a budget line of their own, and the budget law does not have one.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Fatto Quotidiano on 8 November 2026.