Information security expert Samvel Martirosyan told Aravot Daily in an interview that Armenian websites are falling victim to hacks by DDoS. “Around 10 newspapers have fallen victim to these attacks on different levels. Attacks are taking place until now, but they are not successful. The websites primeminister.am, e-gov.am, and gov.am were hacked, as well as the Electric Networks of Armenia, Blognews, and Armenian Times,” he said. Samvel Martirosyan said that since these official websites are protected by the National Security Service, it is difficult to say what happened. “Of course, it would have been better if this information were open so that we could at least find out how this happened. Usually, these websites are well-protected. In this case, I think that they were able to find the vulnerabilities in these sites long ago. They hacked into these websites and waited until now. We have some room for concern because this is not the first time that the primeminister.am website was hacked over the past year.”
IT and Media Consultant Artur Papyan said that he appealed to the Personal Data Protection Agency to find out what happened. It seems that no personal information was leaked as a result of hacking because personal databases were not accessible. They simply were able to “deface” these websites, which means that some of the pages on these websites were changed temporarily. “Usually, these are weaker attacks. It is more dangerous when they are able to access personal databases. This is a form of a hybrid war. There are military operations taking place, but there are also attacks on media websites.”
According to him, there were some simultaneous attacks from 10,000 Azerbaijani IP addresses. “It seems that this operation was one that demanded a lot of coordination. But I am having difficulty imagining that 10,000 users, people, or organizations agreed to carry out such a widespread operation if it was not the state itself.”
Read also
Artur Papyan believed that these attacks were meant to be a form of propaganda and they did not cause a lot of damage to the websites. He also said that Armenian hacking groups are retaliating. “Haqqin.az was part of a DDoS attack. The site was unavailable and they promised that they would continue with more operations.”
Ami Chichakyan
