Baku reports more than 100 state domains attacked as a pro-Iran group claims a hijab-ban reprisal

Azerbaijan’s State Service for Special Communication and Information Security said on Wednesday 14 October that attacks on state information infrastructure began at around 22:00 local time the previous evening. “The attack, carried out by a foreign hacker group, targeted more than 100 state domains located within the state information infrastructure of the Republic of Azerbaijan,” the statement said, adding that it “has disrupted access to web resources belonging to several government bodies.” No country was named. An hour before the recorded start, at 21:00 Baku time on 13 October, a group calling itself 313 Team — described as pro-Iranian and believed to operate from Iraqi territory — posted on Telegram that it had “launched a massive, sophisticated cyberattack targeting 47 key IP ranges belonging to the Republic of Azerbaijan’s government digital infrastructure,” to run for 24 hours. Its stated motive was Azerbaijan’s ban on the hijab in schools and universities, over which it said it had “received numerous complaints.”

On 16 October Azerbaijan’s parliament said the country faces “intensified hybrid attacks” by “hostile forces operating from the territory of friendly and neighboring countries,” which it said aim to “inject their disinformation into digital platforms through channels that appear independent” and operate “by hacker groups, foreign media outlets, real and fake accounts, and bots.” The statement did not mention the hijab ban. It lands, as OC Media notes, during a public quarrel with Ankara over the same ban: on 13 October the ruling New Azerbaijan Party accused Turkish outlets and social platforms, including pro-government ones, of spreading false and biased information about Azerbaijan. For scale, a Sputnik/RIA Novosti report relayed by Bernama — a Russian state wire, and to be read as one — said hackers hit 22 Azerbaijani websites in late September.

Assessment: The outage is announced by the state, not independently measured; the attribution is asserted by the actor, not confirmed by Baku. Both halves are checkable. Forty-seven IP ranges, a hundred-odd domains and a 24-hour window leave a signature that external measurement would show, and nobody has published that check. The phrase “friendly and neighboring countries” is carrying the weight here: it points equally at Iran and at Turkey, and Baku has kept it that way on purpose. Naming Iran would be a policy decision rather than a technical one, and the simultaneous row with Ankara over the same hijab ban pulls against making it. Expect the ambiguity to hold as long as both quarrels are live.