“We are gathered here today because your thoughts and prayers did not secure our app”

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

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?

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

If sinners go to hell, do you even have to do due diligence? Let us pray for the vulnerability to disappear.

From the source blog post, which has the update

The authorization check is there now: request your own user ID and you still get your email back, request someone else’s and you get a public profile. Names are supposed to be public on a platform where you pray alongside other people, so what’s left is what was always meant to be visible.

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.

Damn, with that many people praying these prayers are about to get real effective. I’m surprised we haven’t heard of their effects and effectiveness yet.

I’d like to see the media mix modeling data to really assess the ROP of these prayers. Cross check that against miracle count and we’ll really be cooking.

See, humans are smart. Praying and blessing things yourself? By hand, so to speak? Boooo! Pedestrian! Ain’t nobody got time fo dat!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_flag

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.

Press F to pray respects

It leaks personal data.

a pope app? perfect for indulgence micro transactions

I think they patched that one a while ago

Wow not a good look.

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.

I thought they were known for keeping things under the rug/hidden. Only priest’s not follower’s personal data I guess.

Why does it need any personal details at all??

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 that jesus can torture the bad persons.

Historically? Abuse.

I’m sure they say it’s for security : blocking bots, etc and getting their newsletter or some shit.

So they know what sins I’ve committed.

They don’t follow my mastodon feed. It’s much easier that way.

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 vibe, 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.

To borrow a tenet from another abrahamic religion, trust in God, but tie up your camel.

Is JD Vance in here? He’s supposed to be Catholic right?

Alcoholic, not Catholic!

One can be both.

JD Vance, once an ‘angry atheist’, is America’s most powerful Catholic. How will he wield his faith?

That’s because religion attracts perverts and con men.

the API endpoint GET [redacted] 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.

5 digit user ids, yet over 700k users? Im sure they must have gone up to 6 digits

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_VALUE for your customer ID is a good problem to have

Unless 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.

Good point, could easily be hex or some higher base

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

I tried the endpoint. 5 digits always gives you a valid user, 6 stops working after some point.

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

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

Yes, especially once you have been informed about it

It is illegal to keep deleted profiles

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)

What’s more, scammers now have a list of 750k people known for their gullibility

Was this vibe coded?

That would be rather ironic.

Turns out the biggest miracle wasn’t multiplying loaves, it was making authentication disappear. An IDOR this basic on an app handling personal data is embarrassing. 🙈

I’ve seen so many stories about leaks that I skip most of them. I’m glad I didn’t skip this one.

Why should they care about security user data? We’re all equal before God.

As it often is, the source has more information, and significantly so. I also find it much easier and more informative to read. Simple direct speech, headlines, more concrete on what is exposed, more technical details, etc.

They didn’t just send one email to report the vulnerability.

and on January 3rd I emailed nine people: the general info address, six individual staff members at clicktopray.org, and two contacts at popesprayer.va (the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network). No response. From any of them.

For July they have three entries of ‘reported to Journalist’ (“Dark Reading”), journalist contacted the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, and ‘still no response’.

They also posted an update about it being fixed on 2026-07-24 that it has been fixed.

The authorization check is there now: request your own user ID and you still get your email back, request someone else’s and you get a public profile. Names are supposed to be public on a platform where you pray alongside other people, so what’s left is what was always meant to be visible.

I also never got an email. Not an acknowledgment, not a thank you, not a “we’ve addressed this.”

Given that The Register posted this article on 2026-07-24 22 UTC it must have been very unfortunate timing. Presumably they didn’t check the source again before pressing publish? And also haven’t noticed or bothered to include an information update.

“Pope sprayer .va” is how I’m choosing to read that.

There’s a fucking official app for prayers?!

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.