Azerbaijani attacks on Armenian sites have long become “traditional”. Most often, the attacks are of no interest at all - they hack the sites which are badly monitored, which have no updated software etc.

However, rather bad incidents periodically take place which are aimed at far-reaching ramifications or at least, they may be as such.

The Azerbaijani hackers' attack at the night of February 26 turned out to be one of these emergency situations. In fact, they managed to terminate the operation of around 300 Armenian sites. There were sites on the list of the hacked ones that have been among the targets but they haven't managed to hack them before. This time, hackers chose a different way and made a workaround by hacking DNS of the sites in .am zone and redirecting visitors to their server based in Baku where the propagandist video was placed.

It's a situation when even the most protected site may fall victim to the attack. What is the strangest thing about this attack is that it's not yet possible to know for sure what happened as 2 organizations involved in the incident expressed mutually exclusive opinions.

It's not the first time that the registrar in Armenia has been successfully attacked. The bases of various registrars in .am zone have been undermined at least 3 times before. There was even a case when registration e-mails and passwords of a number of owners of domains were made public on the internet.

The trust to .am zone was first seriously shaken after the state of emergency on March 2-20, 2008, when a number of sites were deprived of their domain names. The attacks happening now undermine this trust to the national .am zone even more. It's a significant problem for a business which spends considerable sums on ensuring its information security as the resource's fallout creates risks related to reputation and finances.

We can recall a series of other attacks which entailed tangible outcomes for users. For instance, leaks of personal data of individuals, leaking of huge amount of electronic correspondence of people who used Armenian e-mail (let's not mention names and organizations) into the net.

Despite all this, we don't see any considerable changes in the field. On the one hand, the society doesn't quite understand what's going on in the field. Majority of people have rather a mythological perception of what's happening which is supported by no less mythological reports of journalists not specialized in the sphere. The society hasn't reached the level yet to demand compliance with elementary rules of saving personal data, for instance.

From professional point of view, personal security is being enhanced but there is no serious progress on the level of internet community on the whole (many people may even say - what is it - internet community in Armenia?), corporate responsibility is not so high either. Sometimes, we don't even hear attempts to apologize to the customers - either silence or attempts to shun responsibility. Everybody can be hacked but not everyone manages to address the situation with dignity.

We consider one important factor here - how well-established the internet community is on the whole, starting from joint efforts that sometimes are needed up to civilized and coordinated approaches to common issues. Such a civilized attitude occurs when the community is moving toward self-regulation without expecting legal solution to each issue.

If the situation continues, if nothing is done about it, there will be migration from Armenian hosting servers (which has long taken place), migration from .am zone and waivers from Armenian commercial services (it should be noted that it's now that we are entering the phase of development of e-commerce).

I think it's time to address some issues on the level of self-regulation (unless the state decides to handle it which will not be the best way out of the situation). For instance, in case of serious incidents when it's not definitely known what happened the community could find a solution through forming an institute of independent audit. I believe there are many issues that the main players of the field could agree upon for the good of both their business and their customers and society in general. Azerbaijani hackers somehow helped us - weren't for them, we wouldn't have raised many issues now.

Samvel Martirosyan is a media expert. These views are his own.