Cyber Incident Victim: Armenia
Date:
Jan 2016
Location:
Armenia
Summary
Azerbaijani hackers defaced the official websites of the country’s permanent missions to NATO, the OSCE and the United Nations, as well as embassy sites in dozens of other countries, replacing them with a page showing Azerbaijani military messages. The defacement was part of an ongoing cyber conflict between Azerbaijan’s Anti‑Armenia Team and the nation’s Monte Melkonian Cyber Army, which had previously leaked Azerbaijani government data and earlier attacked presidential sites.
| CIA Posture | Motives | Tactics, Techniques & Procedures |
|---|---|---|
| Available to members | 3 motives | 1 technique |
| Threat Actors | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 2 actors | Available to members | Available to members |
Description
Azerbaijani hackers identified as the Anti‑Armenia Team carried out a cyber attack three days before the article’s publication date in January 2016. The operation defaced the NATO‑Armenia embassy websites in approximately forty countries. Specific targets included the official site of the Permanent Mission of Armenia to NATO, the Permanent Mission to the Organization for Security and Co‑operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Permanent Mission to the United Nations. The compromised pages were replaced with a defacement page that displayed text and video messages highlighting Azerbaijan’s military power. The attackers stated that the strike was a direct response to recent activities by the Armenian Monte Melkonian Cyber Army, which had leaked sensitive data from Azerbaijani government servers the previous month. They also referenced an earlier defacement on 26 July 2014 in which the Armenian presidential website and several ministries were taken down.
The defacement left the sites with a visible proof of hack, and the attackers provided links to zone‑h mirrors as evidence. In an exclusive interview with HackRead, the hackers claimed that their actions created national‑level problems for Armenia and asserted that Armenian actors lacked the intellectual resources to counter them effectively. At the time of the incident, Armenia and Azerbaijan maintained no diplomatic relations and remained technically at war because of the unresolved Nagorno‑Karabakh conflict. The episode contributed to the ongoing cyber confrontation between the Anti‑Armenia Team from Azerbaijan and the Monte Melkonian Cyber Army from Armenia. No further details about detection, containment, or remediation efforts were disclosed in the source material.