VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider
“Paedophilia”, “obscurantism” and other issues are spurring hackers to take action against the Holy See
Alessandro Speciale
Vatican City
It seems to have become a habit: over the past few weeks, the Anonynous hacker group has targeted the Vatican website www.vatican.va three times, each time making it impossible to access for about an hour or so. The first attack took place on 3 March, the second – which also targeted Vatican Radio servers, hosted by a foreign provider and not by an internal Vatican provider – took place on 12 March an the third and apparently most brief attack took place today.
But why so much viciousness against the Vatican? It is hard to tell reading the communiqués sent by the group of computer pirates, published on the anon-news.blogspost.it website. The first time, the accusations against the Vatican took on the classical anti-clerical tone – from the killing of Italian philosopher and heretic Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake, to accusations of obscurantism. The second time Anonymous focused its accusations on the affairs discussed on Vatican Radio. The third time, the collective communiqué only made reference to the paedophilia scandal, denouncing the violence a priest allegedly shown against a girl who was a friend of one of the hackers.
In all three cases, Anonymous seems to have been unable to get into the Vatican server directly – although it supposedly managed to hack into the Vatican Radio servers, at least partially – also because, as the Holy See stated, on all three occasions when Vatican websites were attacked, traffic was quickly re-directed to other servers.
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