Sometimes you have to work hard to come up with a snarky response to the world’s news, and sometimes the headlines just write themselves. And, sometimes – not often, but sometimes – Azerbaijan is a hotbed of irony.
Take, for instance, this week, when the computers of a European Union official’s staff were hacked during a conference on – wait for it – Internet security held in Azerbaijan this week. It’s almost as bad as when the caterers at the vegan conference served the plate full of bacon-wrapped shrimp. Except, that didn’t really happen, and this did.
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Neeli Kroes, vice president of the European Commission, stated that her advisers’ computers were compromised while in the hotel attenting the Internet Governance Forum in Baku. Apple (News - Alert) alerted the officials to the security breach.
"I'm presuming it was some kind of surveillance," Ryan Heath, spokesperson for Kroes’ office, told the AP. "What we're going to do is to get the computers forensically analyzed to see what if anything was taken out of them."
Heath would not name a possible suspect, but, prior to the event, Kroes did criticize the government of Azerbaijan for allegedly spying on activists and violating journalistic privacy. Kroes sees the hacks as the type of violation that is typical of life in Azerbaijan.
In unrelated news, American tourism to Azerbaijan is down. This is not due to the hacking scandal, but rather the harsh truth that most Americans thought that Azerbaijan was not the name of a country, but rather a minion of Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchises. He Who Must Not Be Named was unavailable for comment.