Hackers from the Monte Melkonian Cyber Army, a group comprised of Armenia hackers, have leaked a trove data supposedly from Azerbaijani banks, military and police servers. One representative from the hacking group sent an email to various reporters giving their reason behind hacking and targeting the government and financial servers. The representative claimed that the group wanted to send a precious gift to the Azeris since it was the 25th anniversary of the Armenian independence.
The hacking group also managed to leak some folders from several party sites and also claimed that the files leaked contained personal data of 1200 Azerbaijani officers, which included names, ID numbers, phone numbers residence addresses and several other details which were related to the officers. Another Armenian group which go by the handle of ‘Noyer_1K, n0p_c0ntr01’ also managed to leak some databases which had customer information from an Azerbaijani bank which included personal data of close to 10,000 people.
Security researchers at news site HackRead scanned the leaked data and managed to find out that among the three folders that had been leaked, they managed to show some banking details of 9,000 customers. Another folder among the leaked documents which was described as Azerbaijan military and police officer personal information, contained about to 46 alleged profiles of the Azeri military, police officials as well as the personal information of officers.
The same folder also has some personal details of the Bayram Vaqif Dilqem Oglu, one Azeri military official who died back in April 2016. The Armenian hackers say that the details about Bayramov show that the data is legit.
The hackers did not just stop at hacking and leaking information from the Azeri government institutes. The hacking group also went on to hack and deface several Azeri embassies and some of the government websites which are linked to them. On the list of the target sites, there was Azeri embassy located in Bulgaria, Netherlands and Qatar. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, AIDA, was also targeted by the Armenian hackers.
HackRead and its security researchers also managed to confirm that among the leaked data there was nothing really substantial. The cyber war between the Armenian and Azerbaijan groups has been going on since 2013. Over the past three years, hackers from both sides have been carrying on cyber attacks against each other and each other’s cyber infrastructure. The MMCA group was previously involved in the leaking of ID cards and passports of about 5,000 Azeri citizens. The two countries currently do not have any diplomatic relations between them and they are technically at war with each other because of the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and dispute.
