7 January 2019
Starting the 28th of December 2018, as it seems now a tradition in the past years, we have received a denial of service attack against azadliq.info, a critical newspaper blocked in Azerbaijan using Allot (Israel) and Sandvine (Canada) deep packet inspection (DPI) gear.
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 extend a government is committed to information control.
The botnet that runs from servers in Digital Ocean, Hetzner and A2 Hosting tries to brute force the search functionality of the website. The same code was used in an attack a year ago as we described in the article “News Media Websites attacked from governmental infrastructure in Azerbaijan”
This botnet seems to be used just to send a message to the newspaper after the publication of several articles related to the real state properties of Aliyev family
“The Guardian”: Ilham Aliyev’s daughters wanted to buy two houses in London worth 60 million pounds
Mehman Huseynov announces hunger strike
Mehman Huseynov (1992) is an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights activist that edits SANCAQ. He was arrested in central Baku the 9 January 2017 for posting pictures on the internet of luxury properties, which he claimed were owned by government officials.