The Vatican Is Said to Be Hacked From China Before Talks With Beijing

In a recent interview with an Italian television program, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, a key negotiator of the agreement, said that with the provisional agreement set to expire in September, the Holy See “wants to continue with this step, it wants to go forward.”

Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening, and top Vatican officials with experience dealing with China declined to comment because they said they did not have sufficient information about the alleged hack.

The revelation comes at a moment when the Trump administration is in near daily confrontation with China over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, closures of diplomatic missions, Beijing’s campaign to claim vast swaths of the South China Sea and American efforts to limit Chinese technological advances in the United States and its allies, especially for installing next-generation communications gear.

But there is no indication that the Trump administration was involved in the report about the attacks on the Vatican.

Recorded Future concluded that the attack was carried out by a state-sponsored group in China, which it named RedDelta. It said that the tactics used by the group were similar to those of other state-sponsored hacking operations that had been identified in the past. But there were also new techniques and new computer code, and identifying the true source of a hack is difficult.

The revelations are certain to anger the Vatican as its relationship with the Chinese government has been enormously delicate, especially over China’s crackdown on Hong Kong. When the Vatican issued prepared remarks on July 5 for Pope Francis’s blessing at St. Peter’s Square, it included a message to the people of Hong Kong, saying the current standoff “requires courage, humility, nonviolence and respect for the dignity and rights of all. I hope that social and especially religious life may be expressed in full and true liberty, as indeed several international documents foresee.”

But in the end, the pope did not deliver those words when he spoke.

The negotiations between the Vatican and Beijing would follow on the provisional agreement of 2018. The deal, the details of which are still largely unknown, was aimed at laying the foundation for a process by which the pope and the Chinese authorities could agree on bishops appointed to the head of official churches in China. As part of the deal, Pope Francis agreed to recognize several bishops who had been appointed by the Chinese government.