BY Daniel Harkins | March 4 | 
0 COMMENTS 
print
Church websites hit by cyber hacks
The websites of Scotland’s archdioceses and one other diocese have been attacked in the last two months.
On January 13, Glasgow Archdiocese’s website redirected visitors to an adult-only site after being hacked, while Aberdeen Diocese’s website was attacked a few weeks later. St Andrews and Edinburgh Archdiocese’s website was also taken offline following an attack.
“After carrying out a range of diagnostic tests, it seems pretty certain that our website has been attacked by hackers,” a spokesman for St Andrews and Edinburgh Archdiocese said. “Our website maintenance company are now working on fitting extra security to the site as swiftly as possible.
“Whether or not we were attacked because we are a Catholic site is not yet known, however it is worrying that at least two other Catholic dioceses in Scotland have also been attacked by hackers in recent weeks.”
A spokesman for Glasgow Archdiocese said their website was attacked by a group from Malaysia who have previously targeted the website of HSBC and the Canadian military amongst others. He said the archdiocese is taking new security precautions as a result.
Aberdeen Diocese’s website suffered a sustained ‘brute force’ attack over two days. Brute force attacks are a trial and error method of gaining access to a website or to sensitive information.
“The attack wasn’t successful but it was pretty stressful,” Fr Tad Turski, who manages the diocese’s online presence, said. “I don’t know what that attackers particular goal was but surely it wasn’t nice.”
Kami Vaniea, a lecturer in cyber security and privacy at Edinburgh University’s School of Informatics, said an attack of this nature on three websites of a single organisation is ‘not necessarily normal,’ but said she believed the attack was most likely randomised.
In regards to the attack on Glasgow Archdiocese, she said that ‘considering the nature of pornography, and the nature of the site, that may have been targeted but I’ve had completely random servers develop that as well.”
In 2012, the website of the Vatican was twice taken down by the hacker collective Anonymous who posted a statement on their site criticising Church teaching and history.
—This story ran in full in the March 4 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.
RSS Feeds