Italy: Catholic anti-gay blog returns after hacking downtime
An anti-gay Italian Catholic blog, which claimed that it was possible to “cure” homosexuality, has come back online after down time, from being subject to an attack from hackers.
Italian Catholic blog Pontifex.roma.it has returned to usual service after it was brought down by a 25-day distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS).
“We’ve been hacked but we’ll be back in a couple of days,” owner Bruno Volpe previously told Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
LGBT groups celebrated the downtime. Gay.it, an Italian LGBT website, branded the site homophobic for comments such as “An openly gay politician is awful, disgusting, a gay can be gay only in his bedroom.”
The site has also been branded misogynistic for statements, such as: “Sometimes women deserve the violence men commit against them, because they provoke them.”
Today the website was back online, to the acclaim of its readers.
“I am very happy that the blog has been reborn,” said a commenter on the site. “This is proof that good always wins over evil and of the seriousness of [Pontifex’s] commitment to destroy the rot spreading.”
An interview on the website with webmaster Carlo di Pietro blamed hacker group Fuckaholics, and alleged that they had asked for an €800 (£681) ransom in order to stop the DDoS attack.
Mr di Pietro said in response to LGBT blogs’ positive reactions to the site going down, “I think this [reaction] was wrong because everyone has his own ideas, everyone must be able to follow the doctrine they like most. It is important not to impose by force, as Jesus taught.”
A DDoS attack renders a server offline or unresponsive by overloading them with external communication requests.
