Hybrid warfare and cyber-attacks, how much do sabotage and false alarms cost?

It is not easy to quantify the economic damage of hybrid warfare, the effects of which affect citizens, businesses and institutions together.

To give some examples: a cyber attack can block a company's activity, compromise sensitive data and make public services unavailable.

Sabotage can disrupt a transportation network or damage strategic infrastructure.

A false bomb threat, when it leads to the evacuation of a building or the hijacking of a plane, involves the activation of safety procedures and costs for all operators involved.

These are rather new phenomena: there is no reliable overall estimate of the cost of hybrid warfare.

However, some indicators can be useful in trying to understand the economic extent of its repercussions.

Starting from the most recent news cases, i.e. the false bomb alerts that threw European aviation into chaos, a clue comes from the data provided by Eurocontrol, an intergovernmental, civil and military organization with the aim of developing and maintaining an efficient traffic control system in Europe.

The simple delay of a flight is estimated to cost between 160 euros and 2 thousand euros per minute, because its effects always go far beyond the connection itself affected by the delay.

Even when they prove unfounded, bomb threat reports trigger emergency protocols, requiring the intervention of law enforcement, such as the use of military flights, which can cost up to tens of thousands of euros.

They often involve diversions or suspensions of connections.

The cost of a single episode therefore depends on various factors: the number of flights involved, the duration of the interruption, any diversion to another airport, the number of passengers to be assisted and the consequences on the planning of subsequent connections.

The cyber front is one of the areas in which the growth of threats linked in some way to the danger of hybrid warfare is becoming more evident.

According to data presented by the National Cybersecurity Agency during a Senate hearing in October 2026, in the first nine months of this year 3,271 cyber events were recorded in Italy, a number already higher than the 2,729 detected in the whole of 2025.

Of these, 1,922 had a confirmed impact and were classified as accidents.

Often this type of attack directly involves businesses.

The economic consequences cannot be limited to the costs necessary to restore the IT systems.

Companies may have to stop production, suspend sales, recover data, notify customers and address potential compensation claims.

Added to these costs are those to strengthen defenses and prevent new incidents.

In this context, an indicator comes from IBM's 2026 report on the cost of data breaches.

In Italy, the average cost of a data breach for the organizations analyzed is growing: it reached 3.55 million euros, compared to 3.31 million the previous year.

The energy sector records the highest average value, equal to 4.65 million euros, followed by the financial sector with 4.5 million and the technological sector with 4.43 million.

It should be noted that these are averages referring to the organizations involved in the research, not an estimate of the cost of all the attacks that occurred in Italy.

The data, however, returns the size of the consequences that a violation can have for an organization.