A group claiming to be an Armenian branch of hacker collective Anonymous has leaked 7 GB worth of documents relating to Azerenergy, the leading energy producer in the Eurasian country of Azerbaijan.
Financial details, offshore communications, contracts, research and photos of passports are among the documents that have been leaked, with the group adding “illegal schemes” to the mix in an announcement posted Tuesday afternoon to cyberguerilla.org – a forum designed to maintain anonymity.
The entire multi-gigabyte package was broken into 13 parts and hosted on AnonFiles.com, an anonymous file- hosting website unrelated to the similarly named hacker collective.
“We are not that very much happy with Aliev's politics therefore this release is just another leap in a series of releases to fight Azerbaijani mafia clans,” the group wrote in its post, indicating there would be more to come.
An Azerenergy representative could not immediately be reached for comment.
Ilham Aliyev is the president of Azerbaijan since 2003 and in a U.S. Embassy diplomatic cable posted to WikiLeaks in 2009 he was compared to mafia figures. According to a EurasiaNet.org article, Aliyev is unbending with regard to domestic political diversity and, according to the WikiLeaks document, the 10-year Azerbaijan leader has a "dual-nature" whose U.S. interests contradict U.S. values.
“HELP AZERBAIJAN FREE OF POLITICAL TERROR AND DICTATORSHIP,” the group wrote in its post.
This is the second time this year that an Azerbaijan organization has suffered an information leak by a group claiming to be Anonymous.
In April, a group calling itself Anonymous leaked 1.5 GB of data from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The group called attention to ties between various corporations and government agencies that were said to have financed terror groups.
Anonymous continues to make headlines – most recently in July for three consecutive releases of lists of FEMA contacts – but the collective has remained under the radar in recent time due to a number of high-profile arrests by the FBI.
Among those FBI arrests are key members of Anonymous splinter group Lulz Security, as well as distributors of the Gozi virus, who are not said to be associated with Anonymous. The Gozi virus infected millions of computers and stole millions of dollars from financial institutions around the globe.
