Armenia is at the center of cyber attacks from Turkey and Azerbaijan

YEREVAN, January 22. /ARKA/. In an interview to ENV Report (https://www.evnreport.com/politics/armenia-at-the-center-of-state-sponsored-cyber-attacks), an Armenian cyber security experts Samvel Martirosyan says Armenian citizens and organizations come under attack primarily of Azerbaijani and Turkish hackers. 

Thus, in 2017 several thousand Armenian profiles on Facebook and Instagram were hacked from Azerbaijan and Turkey. He says until October 2009, when Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) took over the supervision of Armenia's state cyber space, the number of successful attacks from Azerbaijan and Turkey has decreased drastically.

‘However, if we look beyond large-scale attacks to the more targeted ones - cyber operations against important state and non-state institutions, as well as individuals - it is possible to highlight a number of well known cases. And behind each of these are state-sponsored hacker groups or even state structures themselves,’ he says.  

In 2013, Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research & Analysis Team discovered a large scale cyber-espionage network which they called “Red October.” It was able to infiltrate important state and non-state substructures (including diplomatic, governmental and scientific research organizations in different countries, mainly of Eastern Europe and the former USSR) and initiate an elaborate cyber espionage even retrieving deleted files, in case they were of any interest to the creators of the virus.

According to Kaspersky, evidence indicated that the cyber-espionage campaign was active starting from 2007 before being detected in 2013. Armenia made the top ten most infected list with ten cases of infection with the virus. Russia was the most attacked country with 37 cases of Red October infections. -0- 

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16:37 01/22/2018