Spies hacked Azerbaijan government officials as Nagorno-Karabakh conflict escalated

More than 200 people have died in clashes between ethnic Armenian separatists and Azerbaijani government forces over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the last 10 days. It’s the worst outbreak of violence related to Nagorno-Karabakh since Armenia and Azerbaijan, two former Soviet republics, fought a war over the enclave in the 1990s. And this time, hacking has come with the fighting. Unidentified spies have in recent weeks been quietly breaching Azerbaijani government IT networks and accessing the diplomatic passports of certain officials, according to new research from Talos, Cisco’s threat intelligence unit. The Talos data shows how digital espionage often coincides with bursts of violence in modern war. Days after Azerbaijan’s president made a call to mobilize reserve soldiers, the hackers used a fake Azerbaijani government document on the same subject as bait. The malicious code embedded in the document can exfiltrate data from a compromised computer and gives the […]

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