In these hours a hacker attack is underway against the Vatican. Several sites, including that of Pope Francis’ prayers, are inaccessible.
A cyber attack against several Vatican sites is underway . The attacks would have started yesterday and several sites are still unreachable. “404 this site is not accessible”, reads trying to access some of the telematic portals of the Vatican.
“A technical investigation into the incident is already underway”, reads a note signed by Matteo Bruni, press officer of the Holy See . “We’ve had an unusual volume of site login attempts.” The main Vatican site was offline for about four hours.
The timing of the attack doesn’t seem random. On Wednesday, the Russian government criticized a recent statement by Pope Francis, who strongly condemned the violence of the Russian army in Ukraine. In April – recalls Gizmodo -, the pontiff had expressed a more ambiguous position, suggesting that there were also responsibilities of the Ukrainian government. This fundamentally ambiguous and distant position from that of other Western governments had never been denied or retracted, except in a very recent interview given by the pope to American Magazine, a Jesuit-oriented newspaper.
It is not the first time that a malicious actor has put a strain on the network infrastructure of the Holy See. About two years ago, Recorded Future reported that the Vatican’s network infrastructure had been hacked by a group of hackers close to China. In 2019, the Vatican released an official application for the rosary, and that too was hacked (within just 15 minutes of publication) by a cybersecurity expert. In that case it was a technical demonstration, which was then useful to the Vatican to correct some serious vulnerabilities that risked compromising the security of its users.
