A Vatican spokesperson made no immediate comment.
Beijing:
Hackers linked to the Chinese government have infiltrated Vatican computer networks, including the representative of the Roman Catholic Church based in Hong Kong, a U.S. company that tracks state-backed cyber attacks said on Wednesday.
He said the attacks started in May. The Vatican and Beijing were due to start talks this year on renewing a landmark 2018 agreement that stabilized China-Church relations.
U.S. cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said in the report that the attacks targeted the Vatican and the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong, including the head of the Hong Kong study mission, who is seen as the pope’s de facto representative. François in China.
The report says the targets included communications between the Hong Kong Diocese and the Vatican, and used similar tools and methods previously identified with state-backed Chinese hacking groups.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, speaking at a daily press conference in Beijing on Wednesday, said China was a “strong advocate” of cybersecurity.
A lot of evidence rather than guesswork is needed to investigate cyber events, Wang said.
Beijing consistently denies participating in state-sponsored hacking attempts and claims to be a victim of such threats.
A Vatican spokesperson made no immediate comment. The Hong Kong fact-finding mission did not respond to a request for comment.
The hack follows an extremely rare meeting between Beijing and the Vatican’s foreign minister earlier this year in Germany, marking the highest-level official meeting between the two sides in decades.
Relations between the two have improved and they are expected to renew the two-year interim agreement on the functioning of the Catholic Church in China in September.
A Chinese delegation was due to visit the Vatican as part of continuing talks, but there was no indication if or when they would travel due to the coronavirus outbreak, a high-level Vatican source said.
The source, who spoke to Reuters before the hack report, said it was still not clear whether the deal would be automatically extended due to the pandemic and for how long.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
