NextFin News - La Sapienza University of Rome, one of Europe’s most populous and prestigious academic institutions, remains in a state of digital paralysis following a sophisticated ransomware attack that began on February 3, 2026. The university, which serves approximately 120,000 students, was forced to proactively shut down its entire computer infrastructure to contain the breach. As of Thursday, February 5, the institution’s primary website, email servers, and internal workstations remain offline, marking the third consecutive day of total digital darkness for the campus community.
According to TechCrunch, the university confirmed that while it is working to restore services from uncompromised backups, communication channels remain severely limited. The attack has been attributed to a previously unknown threat actor group calling itself "Femwar02." Reports from Italian news outlet Il Corriere della Sera indicate that the hackers utilized the BabLock malware—a high-speed encryption variant also known as Rorschach—and issued a ransom demand accompanied by a 72-hour countdown timer. While the university has established physical "infopoints" to manage exam registrations manually, the disruption has effectively halted mid-semester administrative and research operations.
The emergence of Femwar02 and their use of BabLock represents a significant escalation in the technical capabilities of mid-tier ransomware groups. BabLock is notorious in cybersecurity circles for its encryption speed; according to research from Group-IB, this specific malware can encrypt data significantly faster than traditional defensive tools can trigger an automated response. For an institution the size of La Sapienza, the sheer volume of data—spanning decades of sensitive research, personal records for over 100,000 individuals, and complex financial systems—makes rapid encryption a catastrophic event. The "psychological countdown" tactic employed by the attackers, where the timer only begins once the ransom link is clicked, further demonstrates a shift toward high-pressure negotiation strategies designed to exploit the bureaucratic delays inherent in large public institutions.
This incident is not an isolated case but rather a symptom of a broader systemic vulnerability within the global higher education sector. Universities have become "soft targets" for cybercriminals because they operate as open ecosystems with thousands of decentralized access points. Unlike corporate environments with centralized IT controls, academic networks must balance security with the need for open collaboration and remote access for a transient student population. The economic impact of such outages is profound. Beyond the potential multi-million dollar ransom, the hidden costs include lost research productivity, legal liabilities under GDPR for potential data exfiltration, and the massive capital expenditure required for forensic rebuilding. For instance, the 2025 attacks on Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, cited by TechCrunch, showed that even when ransoms are not paid, the subsequent leaking of stolen data can cause long-term reputational and legal damage.
Looking ahead, the La Sapienza blackout suggests that 2026 will be a year of "industrialized extortion" for the education sector. As U.S. President Trump’s administration continues to emphasize national security and infrastructure protection, the focus on academic cybersecurity is likely to intensify, particularly regarding institutions involved in sensitive government-funded research. We expect to see a trend where hackers move away from simple encryption toward "triple extortion," which involves encrypting data, stealing it for public leak threats, and launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks to keep the victim offline until payment is made.
For large-scale institutions, the lesson from Rome is clear: traditional perimeter defense is no longer sufficient. The speed of BabLock proves that by the time an intrusion is detected, the damage is often already done. Future resilience will depend on "Zero Trust" architectures and immutable backup systems that are physically and logically isolated from the main network. As La Sapienza struggles to return to normalcy, the global academic community must recognize that in the current threat landscape, digital infrastructure is no longer just a utility—it is a primary theater of institutional risk.
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