Cyberattack against the Vatican and more criticism of the Pope after his statements about Ukraine

The Vatican under a Russian cyberattack? Although the Holy See tries to minimize, since yesterday its official website is not working, something that many suspect could be related to the statements made by the Pope in an interview published last Monday, in which he explained his position about the war in Ukraine and clarified that he did not mention Vladimir Putin by name and surname because it was not necessary.

This caused strong reactions in Moscow, where today even the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, joined the chorus of criticism of the Pontiffaccused of discriminating against the ethnic minorities of the Russian Federation for having specifically mentioned the Chechens and Buryats as responsible for the cruelties committed in Ukraine.

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In a press conference, Lavrov touched on the matter referring to the Vatican’s mediation offer: “He says he wants to mediate, but has recently made non-Christian statements about the cruelties committed especially by members of two nationalities of Russia, that is, the Chechens and the Buryats”, said the Russian foreign minister, who went further. “The Vatican said that this will not be repeated and that there was probably a misunderstanding, but this does not help to increase the authority of the Papal State”, he accused.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov

Last Monday, the day the interview was published in the American Jesuit magazine America Magazine, the first to react was Lavrov’s deputy, Maria Zajarova. The official said: “This is no longer Russophobia, but a perversion of the truth on a level never seen before.”

Beyond the Pope’s reference to the Chechens and Buryats, everyone knows that What bothered the most in Moscow was that the top head of the Catholic Church for the first time explicitly said that “the one who invades is the Russian state.”

“When I speak of Ukraine, I speak of a martyred people, of a martyred people. If there is a martyred people, there is someone who martyrs them. When I talk about Ukraine, I talk about cruelty because I have a lot of information about the cruelty of the troops that are coming. Generally, the cruelest are perhaps the peoples who are from Russia, but are not from the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats, etc.,” the Pope said. “Certainly the one who invades is the Russian state. That is very clear. Sometimes I try not to specify so as not to offend and rather to condemn in general, although it is well known who I am condemning. You do not need to put the first and last name, ”he added.

hack

These words angered Moscow. And when yesterday the official Vatican site began to fail and be inaccessible, the first to accuse Russian hackers of a computer attack was the Ukrainian ambassador to the Holy See.Andriy Yurash.

In a tweet, the Ukrainian ambassador accused Russian “terrorists” of having reached and made inaccessible several online pages of different structures of the Roman curia, in response to the “important statements of the Pope.”

“Hackers once again show the true face of Russian politics, directly defined by the European Parliament as terrorist,” he denounced, attaching photos of Russian hackers wanted by the FBI.

In the Vatican, where nobody wants to fuel a diplomatic incident, quite the contrary, they try to minimize. And they prefer not to talk about cyberattacks or hackers. If at the beginning yesterday they explained that the problems were due to “maintenance activities”, they later admitted that they were doing “technical verifications due to anomalous attempts to access the site”.

It is not necessary to be an expert to deduce that these “abnormal attempts to access the site” must have been enormous to cause a collapse of the official site that today was still unresolved after 24 hours.

It is not the first time that there has been a cyberattack against the Vatican. In 2020, as detected by the American company Recorded Future, some Chinese hackers managed to get into the Vatican computer system with malware. The objective would have been to find information in the Secretary of State at a time when contacts were taking place between Beijing and Rome to renew the agreement on the appointment of bishops. Although, as La Repubblica recalled, these accusations were later denied by a spokesman for the Chinese government.

By Elisabetta Pique

Source: Elcomercio