Hackers target Vatican website

The Holy See took down its main website Vatican.ca because of an apparent attack to hack the website, a spokesperson said, according to [Catholic News Agency]x(catholicnewsagency.com/news/252951/vatican-confirms-its-website-was-hacked). Vatican.ca is the official website of Vatican City, where papal encyclicals are published, for example. Spokesman Matteo Bruni told Reuters that technical investigations were ongoing due to “abnormal attempts to access the website.”

Even though it is hard to prove who is behind the cyberattack, several people, under whom the Ukrainian Ambassador in Vatican City, suspect that the Russians targeted the website of the Holy See. One reason for this could be the public statements of Pope Francis. The head of the Roman Catholic Church had stated in an interview that the Russian minorities of the Chechens and the Buryati were the cruellest in the conflict and that Ukraine was a martyred people.

A few hours before the cyberattack, the Russian Ambassador in Vatican, Alexander Avdeev, said publicly that he had expressed his outrage about these statements to the Holy See, Die Tagespost writes. The Vatican itself has not pointed at a possible perpetrator yet.

DDoS

According to Domradio.de, the attack consisted of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS Attack). Hackers then overload the target with a large number of requests. The website cannot deal with all these requests at once and thus shuts down.