Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (VAT1785184303)

In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the The Vatican breach identified under incident ID VAT1785184303.

The analysis begins with a detailed overview of The Vatican's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vatican, the number of followers: 0, the industry type: Government Administration and the number of employees: 411 employees

After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 836 and after the incident was 787 with a difference of -49 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.

In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on The Vatican and their customers.

On 24 July 2026, Click To Pray (Vatican) disclosed Data Breach issues under the banner "Vatican’s Click To Pray App Exposed 700,000 Users’ Data Due to Basic API Flaw".

The Vatican’s *Click To Pray* app, personally endorsed by Pope Francis in 2019, leaked the personal data of over 700,000 users for months due to an elementary API vulnerability.

The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting Click To Pray app backend API, and exposing Names, email addresses, dates of birth, countries, account roles, with nearly 700,000 records at risk.

In response, moved swiftly to contain the threat with measures like Restricted API access to user’s own data, exposed only public-facing details for others, and began remediation that includes Implemented authentication controls for API access, and stakeholders are being briefed through Silent patch after public disclosure.

The case underscores how Resolved, teams are taking away lessons such as Basic security oversights (e.g., missing authentication) can lead to large-scale breaches, especially when compounded by delayed responses from institutions. Foundational security practices (e.g., rate limiting, proper API authentication) are critical for all applications, regardless of their perceived sensitivity, and recommending next steps like Implement authentication and authorization controls for all APIs, enforce rate limiting, conduct regular security audits, and establish a clear vulnerability disclosure process with timely responses.

Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.