Viet-Justice

Inept hackers have attempted to covert the Vatican website Islam.

Some observers in Rome believed that the Islamic group was planning a “denial of service” attack, in which a web site is bombarded with many thousands of simultaneous visits, overloading the available bandwidth and making it impossible for others to reach the site.

A Denial of Service (DoS) is one of the easiest attacks to pull off and also one of the easiest to screw up.  In order to take a website offline through a DoS attack you have to have more internet traffic than the “pipes” to that website will handle.  Considering that the Vatican is a highly visited internet property they must have some heavy bandwidth and heavy servers to handle all the routine visitors.

The Vatican might be vulnerable to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack where tens of thousands of computers around the world are used to launch an attack.  Though I think it is highly unlikely that such an attack would occur since I doubt that many Muslims in the desert have computers or the electricity to power them.