“We are gathered here today because your thoughts and prayers did not secure our app”
Why does it need any personal details at all??
So that jesus can torture the bad persons.
For sharing between users, as I understand it.
Username, password is all they need for that. Idiots.
But muh statistics :c
I have 100% attendance god damnit!
So they know what sins I’ve committed.
They don’t follow my mastodon feed. It’s much easier that way.
Historically? Abuse.
I’m sure they say it’s for security : blocking bots, etc and getting their newsletter or some shit.
They need the list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
Or is that the other fella?
I expect they’re using some kind of authentication framework that supports full names in its User entity, and just went with that without considering whether it’s sensible.
Looks like you can leave comments on prayers? Could also be that they want a particular aesthetic where everyone has their innate “Christian Name”, instead of a username, which is assocated with left wing ideas like digital utopianism. Because…
Real names also enforce a complex of related authoritarian information structures i.e. they provide information about a person’s culture, race, gender, which you can use to assign them a place within your religion’s moral hierarchy.
the API endpoint GET
[]will return user data for any account - not just your own account - so long as you supply a valid, five-digit user ID. It doesn’t perform any authorization check or ownership validation. “Just increment the number and get someone else’s data,” she wrote.This data includes users’ email addresses, first and last names, country, dates of birth, and whether the account has been deleted, and the API exposes all 719,517 accounts on the prayer site. “With sequential user IDs and no rate limiting, an attacker could enumerate every single account on the platform,” the hacker explained. “One GET request per user. for i in range(1, 719518): scrape(). That’s it. That’s the exploit.”
My God, that’s horrific. Plus it doesn’t even delete your data if you delete your account, it’s still vulnerable.
I wonder of the vatican is part of the gdpr…
Would be funny to read about the church getting sued for that.I don’t know much about GDPR… is it illegal to have badly written software like this? Technically the user is bypassing normal usage and “hacking” the API
Negligence to delete the account data after termination is a reason to be fined.
They don’t need to keep that data.
Afaik the only reason would be if MTX were offered (for book-keeping reasons)It is illegal to keep deleted profiles
5 digit user ids, yet over 700k users? Im sure they must have gone up to 6 digits
I tried the endpoint. 5 digits always gives you a valid user, 6 stops working after some point.
They probably meant 6 digit and it was a typo. The rest of the article references 6 digits. If it’s just an integer (highly likely) it would go up to 10 digits or roughly 2 billion max users. My old coworkers and I used to joke that hitting
INTEGER.MAX_VALUEfor your customer ID is a good problem to haveUnless by “digit” they mean any alphanumeric.
You’ve got a lot of options if you go to a 5 characters with letters.
Which they’d kind of have to with 700k users if it’s 5 characters.
If it’s case insensitive, you’ve got 60,000,000+ combinations, and if case sensitive then 916,000,000+ combinations.
It’s numerical only, but the number doesn’t need leading 0s so anything from 1 to 6 digits might be a valid user ID.
That would be an absolute nightmare to administer lol. Though I guess that tracks.
1, 01, 001, 0001, and 00001 would all be different users
Good point, could easily be hex or some higher base
It sill works, you get first name and last name.
Maybe I should remove that from my comment lol, I feel like I’m contributing to a data breach or something
It is in the article doesn’t matter if you remove it. The moment the article became public it is already too late.
I know, but a lot of people don’t click the article, they just look at headline + comments, so it’s still a reduction of visibility or an extra step. My comment is like exposing the endpoint right there front and centre. Plus, I don’t like being personally responsible for any data breach. Maybe it’s just a tiny thing but it felt like the right thing to do
What’s more, scammers now have a list of 750k people known for their gullibility
The Catholic Church is known for a lot of things. Keeping up with the times (or cyber security) isn’t one of them.
Cyber security isn’t in the bible. Time for an update.
Cyprus 1:1
…. Copy pasta of NIST security standards circa May 2026 …
Nothing could go wrong with this.
Vatican Programmer: Oh, mighty Lord, sitting in the Sky, show me the way to this bug I seek and eliminate ineffectiveness. Amen.
Still better than vibe coding
The OG vibecoders
How so? They are praying for it to work
Well, i pray to not have any runtime bug too
Vatican Programmer: Contractor in India
Apply the sacred unguents and start the maintenance rites
So uh… what does a prayer app even do?
It connects users across the globe to pray for the Holy Father’s intentions, and as of July 2026, it has 719,517 registered accounts
The only two screenshots they have on GPlay feature prayer scheduling and sharing your prayer.
Press F to pray respects
It leaks personal data.
See, humans are smart. Praying and blessing things yourself? By hand, so to speak? Boooo! Pedestrian! Ain’t nobody got time fo dat!
the Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread the good will and compassion into all pervading space. Therefore, prayer flags are thought to bring benefit to all.
By hanging flags in high places the Lung ta will carry the blessings depicted on the flags to all beings. As wind passes over the surface of the flags, which are sensitive to the slightest movement of the wind, the air is purified and sanctified by the mantras.
I choose to believe that the prayer app is just a hip, new and with it innovation in prayer spreading.
It still works lmao
No email and some other stuff though… maybe they just removed that from the endpoint?
lmao did they vibe patch it or smth
Misread it as
Pope’s official prayer app, “Cardinal Sin”…
That’s the official Catholic hook up app. It’s different.
Actually….
I thought that was Roblox?
Why not just give the app away and let people access the content without having them sign up? Oh right… The people are the product.
There’s a fucking official app for prayers?!
a pope app? perfect for indulgence micro transactions
I think they patched that one a while ago
Was this vibe coded?
That would be rather ironic.
To borrow a tenet from another abrahamic religion, trust in God, but tie up your camel.
Why should they care about security user data? We’re all equal before God.
Is JD Vance in here? He’s supposed to be Catholic right?
Alcoholic, not Catholic!
That’s because religion attracts perverts and con men.
