Vatican website targeted in possible hacking activity

The Vatican said its website experienced a host of continued “anomalous” access attempts and strange activity between Wednesday and Thursday.

Vatican.va, the official portal of the Vatican, was “temporarily inaccessible” until late Thursday.

“(There are) ongoing technical investigations due to anomalous attempts to access the site” the Vatican Press office said.

The portal vatican.va was still not working at full capacity and is in fact inaccessible more than 24 hours after the first recorded malfunctions, the press office said.

The access attempts “are not coming from a single Country,” the Vatican reports again (but it is well known that hackers can also simulate access attempts and attacks from different locations).

The Vatican’s IT staff has therefore been at work for over a day to ascertain the nature of the computer “anomaly”.

The suspected hack came a day after Moscow criticised Pope Francis’s latest condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In an interview with a Jesuit magazine, the pope had singled out troops from Chechnya and other ethnic minorities in Russia for their particular “cruelty” during the war.

Via ANSA