Ilham Aliyev at the World Economic Forum at Davos 2018. Photo CC BY 4.0: Wiki. Some rights reserved.On 11 April, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev will be re-elected to his fourth term in office while his major rivals sit in jail or boycott the snap elections. Despite the certain result, hackers, apparently acting on the orders of the Azerbaijani government, have used cheap ransomware, imported surveillance hardware and bullying tactics to head off any freedom of expression or organisation online.
In addition to the nuts and bolts of how an authoritarian state works to prevent the sort of online organisation that once dominated headlines worldwide, this is also a story about how the built-in deniability of cyber-attacks insulates Azerbaijan from unwanted attention from the international community – and how inexpensive and accessible cyber-authoritarianism can be in 2018.
Turning up the pressure
The pressure campaign in question began a few weeks after President Ilham Aliyev returned from the Eastern Partnership Summit in Brussels in late November 2017. It was also around the time that an appeals court uphold an order to block the country’s five major independent news websites.
