CSF April 2022

LOCAL NEWS

Apparent cyberattack during Rosary for Peace in Ukraine

An online “Rosary for Peace in Ukraine” led by Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone was disrupted by an apparent cyberattack on March 2. Archbishop Cordileone’s rosary for peace followed the lead of Pope Francis who called for prayer and fasting for peace in Ukraine on Ash Wednesday. An unprecedented number of requests to access the website temporarily knocked the website offline during the rosary. “The evidence strongly suggests it was a cyberattack,” said Father Patrick Summerhays, vicar general and moderator of the curia. The rosary page was definitely the cause of the outage, said Father Summerhays. The pattern of this sudden surge in traffic is consistent with a method of cyber attacking called Distributed Denial of Service Attack. The source of the attack could not be immediately identified by the website hosting company. ■