The official website of the Russian embassy in Israel was hacked and defaced by Azerbaijani hackers — Thanks to the words for war between the governments.
On Sunday, a pro-Turkish hacking group from Azerbaijan targeted the site of the Russian embassy in Israel (russianembassy.org.il) and uploaded image of a Turkish flag on its homepage stated the embassy’s press attaché Evgeny Piskunov.
“The site is not functioning. The reasons are being clarified,” explained Piskunov.
According to Piskunov, technical work was proceeding with help from the Israeli providers to restore the website of the Russian diplomatic mission. Ironically, the Russian and English language consulate pages were left unharmed.
The hacker group managed to redirect all the website’s visitors to pages that showed Azerbaijani and Turkish nationalist images.
Deface page left by the hackers
Turkey and Russia’s relationship has already soured after the latter shot down a Russian SU-24 jet, which was performing airstrikes in northern Syria. Turkish authorities claimed that the Russian jet has violated Turkish airspace.
Russia, however, quickly denied the accusation and blamed Turkey for attempting to cover up its links with the cross-border militant group so-called Islamic State (ISIS/Daesh).
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This Sunday afternoon, the embassy website remained down with the page’s Google cache showing nothing about the Russian diplomatic mission to Israel but the Turkish national flag and the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was Turkey’s first president and most-respected national hero of the nation. The link of targeted website along with its mirror as a proof of hack are available in the tweet below:
https://twitter.com/BortecineBST/status/688433737646870528
This attack has been launched exactly two weeks after the Instagram account of the Russian Communications and Mass Media Minister Nikolay Nikiforov was hacked. Nikiforov’s account remained breached for a few hours and the images of Turkish leaders and flag graced his account during the time.
The next day, the hacker also took down the official website of Moscow’s Lokomotiv football club’s website for a brief period.
All these attacks were launched after a pro-Turkish Azerbaijani hacker group Börteçine Siber Tim announced in December that it was ready to take on Russian websites.
This group already claimed the responsibility of compromising the embassy website and numerous other Israeli websites including the Instagram account of Nikiforov, on its Facebook page.
This attack is the second of its kind against the Russian government by Börteçine Siber Tim.
Another Turkish group THT conducted a DDoS attack on Russian Central Bank earlier in November last year forcing the site to go offline for over 10 minutes.
At the time of publishing this article, the Russian embassy in Israel website was offline due to the cyber attack.
