Security flaw in Vatican’s ‘Click to Pray’ app leaves over 700,000 global users exposed - app has been leaking user data for over six months and still does

Discovery

An app linked to the Vatican with hundreds of thousands of users was found to have zero authentication and security. That means anyone can access its backend and siphon users’ data, including names, email addresses, and birthdates. While the issue has since been resolved, it remained open for six months (or longer) with the developers not taking any action.

According to security researcher BobDaHacker, they discovered in January 2026 that Click To Pray, the official prayer app of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, had zero security. Anyone could access user data through the API endpoint by simply typing in user IDs. BobDaHacker emailed nine individuals about the vulnerabilities as soon as they discovered them but received no responses and saw no changes for six months.

Vulnerability Details

The information that anyone could get from the Click To Pray app’s database included first and last names, email addresses, and birthdates, among other information. You may not think this is much, but getting names and email addresses is more than enough for bad actors to start sending phishing emails to vulnerable users.

BobDaHacker also pointed out that most of the app’s users are likely older people who aren’t tech-savvy, so any enterprising scammer could tap into the app for a literal treasure trove of email addresses. It was also easy to get the complete list automatically. The user ID assigned to new accounts is sequential, and since there’s no rate limiting for the API, all it takes is one GET request per user to capture all that information.

Aside from this, the validation_hash used to verify the validity of an account signup is also stored in the clear, meaning anyone with access to the API can verify an account by opening their inbox. The email also had security issues that make it look like a phishing email, even if it’s legitimate.

Data at Risk

You may think that a prayer app shouldn’t be much of a target for cybercriminals, especially as this has a small install base compared to the 16 billion accounts exposed in one of the largest data breaches in history. But the fact that it had almost 720,000 accounts as of July 2026 meant that there are many possible targets within that database. Even if just 1% of these users respond to an enterprising cybercriminal who harvested their email addresses from the app, that’s more than 7,000 different individuals who could lose money because of this leak.

Lack of Response

BobDaHacker waited for six months for a response, but unfortunately, no one related to the app responded to their concerns. Because of this, they contacted Nate Nelson, a security journalist for Dark Reading (who similarly received crickets after contacting them), who published a story about it.

Resolution

It was only after the news went live that the app’s security lapses were fixed, even if BobDaHacker wasn’t, at the very least, acknowledged by the makers of the app. Hopefully, no other hackers were aware of the weaknesses of the Click To Pray app.