Armenian Cyber-Warriors Target Azeri Websites After Safarov Pardon

ARMENIAN CYBER-WARRIORS TARGET AZERI WEBSITES AFTER SAFAROV PARDON

Infosecurity Magazine

Sept 5 2012

A cyber-war of sorts has broken out between Armenian and Azeri
hackers over the August 31 extradition and pardon of Azeri murderer
Ramil Safarov.

Safarov was attending the Hungarian National Defense University
under NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 2004, in Budapest,
when he hacked to death an Armenian classmate with an axe. The act
was to pay back, he later said, the atrocities that Azeris suffered
in the Armenian- Azerbaijan conflict, since he wasn’t able to kill
anyone during the war itself.

He confessed to the crime and was serving a life sentence in Hungary
when the Azeri government put in a request for extradition, requesting
that he serve the remainder of his sentence in his home country and
providing assurances that he would remain in jail. The Hungarians
complied, but Safarov was immediately pardoned once on Azeri soil,
promoted to the rank of major in the Azerbaijani army, and hailed as
a national hero.

Outraged, a group of Armenian hackers has attacked 15 Azeri websites,
prompting return hacking fire from Azeri cyber-warriors.

The skirmish is the latest in an ongoing war: Azeri cyber attackers
have hacked about 40 Armenian websites in the last two years,
while the Armenians have targeted about 20 Azeri websites, mostly
state-government and news sites. The latest targets included the Azeri
Supreme Court, the presidential website and the official websites
of Azerbaijan’s ministries of tourism and culture, and communication
and transport.

Infosecurity expert Samvel Martirosyan told ArmeniaNow that this
“is the biggest cross-fire in the Armenian and Azerbaijan cyber war
of the recent years. Both sides have been attacking for the past two
years: DDoS attacks, when a website simply becomes ‘not accessible’
and when the site is hacked and injected with unrelated content.”