ROME -- Italian Postal and Communications Police dismantled a centre for cyber-espionage Tuesday that had been spying on ex-PMs Renzi and Monti, high-profile bankers, businessmen and freemasons, arresting two people, police said.

 The newly-discovered centre for cyber-espionage had been spying on ex-Prime Ministers Matteo Renzi and Mario Monti, the former ECB president Mario Draghi, the former governor of Banca d’Italia and the ex-commander of the Finance Guard, amongst other high profile national politicians, businessmen, bankers and managers -- having been collecting information for years.

 Another one of the figures observed by the “Eye of the Pyramid” was Stefano Bisi, the Grand Master of the Freemasonry of the Grand Orient of Italy, and others belonging to the same masonic lodge. It seems that one of the hackers, Giulio Occhionero, was linked to the Roman masonic lodge 'Paolo Ungari - Nicola Ricciotti Thought and Action.'

 The people observed were categorized into many different groups under 122 different headings in the hackers’ files -- they had built up a database of 18,327 usernames.

 The investigation into the espionage was conducted by the Italian Postal and Communications Police and coordinated by by prosecutor Eugenio Albamonte from Rome’s Public Prosecutor’s Office. The FBI’s Cyber Division also collaborated to the investigative process.

 The investigation led to the arrest of two people in the capital -- the nuclear engineer Giulio Occhionero, aged 45, and his sister Francesca Maria, aged 49. They are both residents of London but live in Rome, and are both known in the world of high finance in Italy.

 It turns out that Giulio Occhionero is the title holder of ‘Westlands Securities Srl Limited,’ a company registered at the address “Suite F, Block A, Dolphin Court, Embassy Way, Ta’Xbiex” in Malta.

 The siblings have been charged with the crimes of procurement of information regarding the safety of the state, abusive access to an aggravated IT system and illicit interception of IT communication and telecommunication.

 The investigators form CNAIPIC, the National Anti-IT Crime Centre of the Postal Police, found out that the two siblings managed a web of computers (botnet) that had been infected with a malware called ‘Eyepyramid,’ allowing them remote access to private and sensitive data from dozens of high-profile figures, especially from the world of Italian finance.

 It was CNAIPIC who first sounded the alarm about the ‘Eyepyramid’ virus, which was detected in an e-mail addressed to a prominent manager of a critical infrastructure, and this sparked the subsequent investigation.

 nkd