E-Jihadists Attack Vatican Website

The headship of 'electronic jihad' on November 28, 2006 attacked the Vatican Website and brought it down. The online Islamic terrorists called 'e-jihadists' sent out programs to many hackers all over the world to plan a multi-pronged strike on the Website when Pope Benedict XVI made a trip to Turkey, an Islamic nation. At the time when thousands of Turks came down to protest the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to their country, the Church was facing another threat from raging Muslims - a cyber attack aimed at the Vatican Website.

Web forums linked to 'Al-Qaida' were used to send an appeal to the Jihadists hackers through a post on two of the Web sites that publish messages of the terrorist organization. In a statement in Arabic, the leadership of the electronic jihad explained the reason behind the attack against the Vatican site as the insults the Pope poured on their Prophet. This was in reference to the Pope's remarks in a speech on September 12, 2006. In that speech, the Pope quoted a 14th century emperor who described Islam as a religion 'spread by the sword'.

Hackers made the first attack on the Vatican Website on October 11, 2006. At that time, the Vatican computer experts were able to identify and remove the insertions and there was no considerable damage.
So far, Vatican security officials have not been able to understand what the attackers seek to accomplish. However, they suspect a 'denial of service' aimed on the site visitors as the hackers inundate the Vatican servers with messages from a 'botnet network' that they compromised. The hackers also made available the program they designed for the attacks for download by future hackers on the Jihadists Web sites.

Vatican authorities were once again successful to thwart this 'cyber attack' that appeared during the Pope's visit. So far, there has been no instance of cyber attacks on the Website causing physical damage. Indeed, there have been several cases of Website shutdown by Islamist hackers, particularly Israel and other countries, but there have been no physical damage or serious disruptions by any of them.

Related article: E-Crime Reporting Format To Be Launched in July

» SPAMfighter News - 12/4/2006