Someone just shut down hundreds of schools across Italy with a single email blast, targeted schools across the United Kingdom and Ireland the same day, and the press is calling it a hoax without demanding answers about who coordinated a multi-country attack on children.
This is not a one-off. It is the latest strike in a systematic campaign targeting European infrastructure — supermarkets, blood banks, airlines, broadcasters, and now schools. Someone is testing how easily they can paralyze daily life across an entire continent, and the media's response is to shrug and move on.
On Wednesday, roughly 300 Italian schools evacuated after receiving identical emailed bomb threats, according to CNN and the Associated Press. Italian Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara confirmed the number to Italian TV but downplayed the threats as cyber-related and not a "genuine risk." Schools in Northern Ireland received the same email — more than 300 of them, according to police — and institutions in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland were hit too. British and Irish authorities treated the messages as hoaxes and kept schools open.
In Italy, parents dropped everything to collect frightened children. "My daughter Dafne started crying because the kids did not understand what was happening, and she was still shaken when I picked her up," Nensi Bego, a parent at the Mazzini middle school in Rome, told NBC News.
The email was signed "Mikhail Andropov, leader of the Vilayat of Misoginistan," according to a copy reviewed by Reuters. The same purported sender claimed responsibility for bomb threats to newsrooms in Ireland and Bulgaria last week. The message also contained a direct threat against Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which her office declined to comment on.
A national security source told Reuters the attack was trivially easy: school email addresses are public, and sending the threats was "as easy as drinking a glass of water."
Some European officials suspect Russia is behind a broader campaign of disruption targeting nations supporting Ukraine, NBC News reported. Iran is another suspect — France summoned Tehran's ambassador last week after a cyberattack disabled refrigerators in hundreds of supermarkets. Both Russia and Iran deny involvement. Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto called the threats part of a strategy "to spread fear and create anxiety," but then hedged, saying it could also be "attention-seekers and lunatics who, at a time like this, cannot wait to unleash terror."
That is quite a range. Either hostile foreign governments are waging coordinated infrastructure warfare against Western civilians, or they are not. "Attention-seekers" do not simultaneously hit schools in Italy, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland. They do not disable supermarket refrigerators in France and bomb airlines and broadcasters across a continent in preceding weeks. The scale is the story.
CNN framed the incident as a "suspected hoax" in its headline. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution buried the threat against Meloni in a single sentence and noted her office had no comment. NBC News provided the most detail — including the pseudonymous sender name and the Russia-Iran angle — but still treated the question of culpability as a he-said-she-said between European officials and the governments they suspect.
Meloni said there was no indication of "concrete danger" and that the threats appeared aimed at "generating alarm and concern." That may well be true. But generating alarm and concern across multiple countries simultaneously is itself an act of aggression, and the public deserves to know who is doing it and why.
Law enforcement across at least four countries is now investigating. The pattern of attacks — infrastructure, media, schools — suggests operational planning, not idle trolling. Every day without an answer is a day whoever did this learns they can do it again.
