106 Catholic Websites Hacked by Tunisian "Cyberjihadists"

Country: France

Date of incident: April 16, 2016


On April 16th, many Catholics discovered that their parish website’s home page was replaced with messages in English denouncing "terrorism against Muslims” in Burma by Buddhists, and in Palestine by "Zionists" or in Mali by the "French forces." The messages were set against a black background and topped with a Tunisian flag.

A group of Tunisian “cyberjihadist” hackers calling themselves the Fallaga Team boasted about the crime on its Facebook page on April 16th. The victims of the hackers were 106 different websites of French parishes and congregations located in Quimper, Meaux, Lyon, Reims, Valencia, Nantes, Puteaux, Sartrouville and Paris. The group described these sites "Catholic websites of the French occupier." The IT department of the Bishops' Conference of France quickly discovered the criminal hacking of their sites on Saturday afternoon thanks to automated monitoring tools.  Source: La Croix