Anonymous Targets Vatican Website

The Vatican has become the latest victim of hactivist collective Anonymous, who took down the Holy See’s website on Wednesday.

The collective said that its actions were in revenge for the “corruption” of the Roman Catholic Church over the course of its history.

Unholy actions

The Guardian reports that the Vatican website was still inaccessible to users on Wednesday evening and that a spokesman was unable to confirm whether or not the outage was caused by Anonymous.

However the group claimed responsibility on its Italian website, accusing the church of numerous crimes, in particular the selling of indulgences, trinkets purchased by Catholics who feared their deceased loved ones were in purgatory during the 16^th century, and the burning of heretics during the inquisition.

“Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organisation spreads around the world,” it said. “This attack is not against the Christian religion or the faithful around the world but against the corrupt Roman Apostolic Church.”

The attack comes just days after Lulzsec, a group affiliated with Anonymous, was brought down by the FBI with the help of its former leader. A number of Lulzsec members were arrested in the UK, Ireland and US and Anonymous took revenge by taking down several websites owned by Panda Security, which it said cooperated with the investigation.

This was the latest in a number of setbacks for the group after law enforcement officials in Spain, Argentina, Chile and Colombia arrested 25 individuals believed to be connected with Anonymous as part of Interpol’s ‘Operation Unmask’. Anonymous were also themselves the victim of attackers who tricked them into installing Zeus botnet code onto their systems.

However, this has not stopped it targeting Brazilian banks in a protest against widespread inequality in the country and secretly recording a conversation about the collective between the FBI and UK e-Crimes Unit.

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