BAKU, Azerbaijan - Azerbaijan’s National CERT has linked distributed denial-of-service attacks against Azerbaijani internet resources from Oct. 13 to 15 to a commercial service called Litterbox, also known as Catbox.
The National Cybersecurity Agency said the attacks targeted websites belonging to government agencies, media organizations, Azerbaijani diplomatic missions abroad and other institutions. A group operating on Telegram under the name “313 Team” claimed responsibility, the agency said. The claim does not independently establish the identity or affiliation of those behind the attacks.
Technical investigators found that the commercial DDoS service was offered through Telegram channels and accepted payment in cryptocurrency. The service can generate heavy traffic over GRE, ICMP, UDP and TCP protocols to disrupt access to targeted resources, according to the agency.
Investigators also found that users could route attack traffic through bots in selected countries, potentially reducing the effectiveness of defenses based on the traffic’s geographic origin.
Indicators associated with the campaign have been added to the agency’s Malware Information Sharing Platform at misp.cert.az. Organizations were advised to continuously monitor network traffic, strengthen DDoS protection and improve the resilience of their online resources.
The findings were reported by APA and Report on Oct. 16.