Thursday, February 13, 2025

Viagra offered for sale: Website of the diocese of Basel hacked

Has the diocese of Basel started selling Viagra? 

Of course not - and yet, according to media reports, the website of the Swiss diocese recently featured an online shop for the well-known sexual enhancer. 

The diocese's website was hacked by fraudsters, reported the Bern-based newspaper "pfarrblatt" on Monday. 

 They had exploited technical vulnerabilities and placed an illegal shop for Viagra on the church website. 

According to the report, the alleged shop was discovered by a journalist from the Swiss magazine "Beobachter", who came across it during research. 

The journalist informed the diocese about the problem, which was then rectified.

According to the "pfarrblatt", the diocese of Basel was the third ecclesiastical victim of a cyberattack in Switzerland in a short space of time. 

In November, the abbey district of St. Gallen was hit first, followed by the diocese of Sion at the beginning of December; the diocese's website went offline for a short time as a result. In both cases, hackers claimed to have stolen data, according to the report. 

In the case of St Gallen at least, a ransom was also demanded, but this was not paid.

Outdated IT infrastructures and so-called phishing attacks are suspected to be the reason for the successful attacks. 

The Swiss Federal Office for Cyber Security writes on its website: "There are two widespread gateways through which hackers and cyber criminals can gain access to a website: stolen access data for website administration and an outdated content management system (CMS)." 

With stolen access data, fraudsters gain unrestricted access to websites and can change content at will and add new, harmful elements. Criminals regularly find security gaps in the programme code of content management systems and exploit them to install malware.