Sandman and FineProxy behind the DDOS attacks against timetv.live

Another try of the best “hackers” from oil rich Azerbaijan!
Timetv.live is the latest Azeri news site targeted by Denial of Service attacks. The 21st of March, the website received a Denial of Service attack after the publishing of an article about Mubariz Mansimov, a businessman who has been imprisoned and claims that the arrest was ordered by the head of SOCAR – State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Rovnag Abdullayev and his cousin Anar Alizade. This report focuses on the forensics of the attack in an attempt to attribute the attack.

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Targeted sophisticated phishing attacks against dissidents in Azerbaijan is trending

During the past year Qurium has recorded an increase of targeted phishing attacks against against independent media and human rights activists in Azerbaijan. The attacks are launched from infrastructure in the country with total impunity.

The story of Fizza Eydarova, editor of Azadliq.info, is an example of how phishing attacks against regime critical journalists and human rights defenders in Azerbaijan are getting more targeted and sophisticated. Additionally, phishing attacks are being launched from IP space belonging to AzerTelecom, one of the country’s largest Internet provider, with total impunity.

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Azerbaijani Media Remains in a ‘Very Serious Situation’

Once again, Azerbaijan has been ranked 166 in the Reporters without Borders yearly World Press Freedom Index.

The index, which ranks countries’ media situation based off of categories such as pluralism, media independence and abuses, found no positive improvement in Azerbaijan to warrant a vertical movement on the list.

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A Regime Conceals Its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture

A groundbreaking forensic report tracks Azerbaijan’s recent destruction of 89 medieval churches, 5,840 intricate cross-stones, and 22,000 tombstones.

In April 2011, when a US Ambassador traveled to Azerbaijan, on the southwestern edge of the former USSR, he was denied access to the riverside borderland that separates this South Caucasus nation from Iran. But it was not a foreign foe that halted the visit. Instead, his Azerbaijani hosts insisted that the envoy’s planned investigation inside the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan (officially, Naxçıvan Autonomous Republic) could not proceed because it was motivated by fake news. The ambassador had intended to probe the reported destruction of thousands of historical Medieval Christian Armenian artworks and objects at the necropolis of Djulfa in Nakhichevan. This cemetery is recorded to have once boasted the world’s largest collection of khachkars — distinctive Armenian cross-stones. However, according to Azerbaijani officials this reported destruction was a farce, that the site had not been disturbed, because it never existed in the first place. Despite ample testimony to the contrary, Azerbaijan claims that Nakhichevan was never Armenian.

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In Azerbaijan, big brother is watching you everywhere: offline, online, on mobile devices and social media apps

On January 7th 2019,VirtualRoad, the secure hosting project of the Qurium – Media Foundation published a report documenting fresh attacks against Azerbaijan’s oldest opposition newspaper Azadliq’s website (azadliq.info). The report concluded: “After ten months trying to keep azadliq.info online inside Azerbaijan using our Bifrost service and bypassing multi-million dollars DPI deployments, this is one more sign of to what extent a government is committed to information control”. The DPI deployments also known as Deep Packet inspection have been used in Azerbaijan since March 2017 and is best described as digital eavesdropping that allows information extraction.

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Statement by US Senators on the Organized Massacre of Armenians in Baku, 1990

On January 18, 1990, a group of US senators, including the future Secretary of State John Kerry, sent a letter to the USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev in connection with the pogroms of Armenians in Baku:

“We are deeply concerned about the killings, violence, and plunder of the Armenian population committed by groups of organized Azerbaijanis over the past six days.

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Azerbaijan must admit the guilt for Armenian pogroms

These January days, Armenians around the world remember the victims of the Armenian pogroms in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, 29 years ago.  For a whole week, from January 13 to 19, 1990, the Azerbaijani authorities organized and carried out mass pogroms of the Armenian population of the city. About a quarter of a million local Armenians were subjected to violence and deportation only because of their national identity, as a result there is no Armenian left in Baku now. 

The immovable and movable property of thousands of Armenians was looted and taken away. According to estimates of various international organizations, about 500 Armenians became victims of the violence.

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