Dethroned Azerbaijani Elites Made Big Investments in Europe

When Eldar Mahmudov fell out of favor with Azerbaijan’s government, he fell hard.
In October 2015, the country’s national security minister was dismissed from his powerful role by a presidential order. Within days, wild stories peppered local media outlets about raids on his villa, where police discovered glass jars full of diamonds and cardboard boxes stuffed with foreign currency. His ministry associates were reportedly arrested on various charges linked to corruption and extortion, and a statue honoring his late father — a famous economist — was unceremoniously demolished.

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Freedom of Speech and Human Rights in Azerbaijan

In Azerbaijan, human rights defenders and NGOs have less and less space for activity. In recent years, amendments to laws have been adopted that impose restrictions on the work of human rights defenders and strict state control over it. The arrests of the most famous human rights defenders and the subsequent trials that ended in prison terms show that Azerbaijan is confidently moving towards authoritarianism, apparently taking over from Russia its neglect of civil society.

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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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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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