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Recently, there has been an increasing information attack on a number of Russian hosting sites, including Aeza. These attacks are accompanied by the distribution of various exposés, which often have political overtones. In this article I will share the results of my detailed investigation into one such exposé about Aeza hosting. The material I came across is clearly aimed at discrediting the company and is not only commercial but also politically motivated.

Qurium: A fictitious organization

Existence Study

Before we get to the exposé, let's take a look at Qurium, the organization that initiated the Correctiv article. Qurium positions itself as an independent organization dedicated to protecting digital rights and freedoms. However, our investigation revealed that Qurium does not exist in Sweden, as stated on their website, but operates from the territory of Ukraine for the benefit of private individuals or Ukrainian government agencies.

Absence in registries: A check in Swedish registries of legal entities, such as allabolag.se, showed that the organization called Qurium is not listed there. This raises serious doubts about the legitimacy of their activities. The website allabolag.se also failed to find any information about the company VirtualRoad, with which Qurium is associated.
Website without information: The lack of any information on Qurium's website about the legal address, company structure and public reporting is additionally alarming. This is not typical of legitimate organizations that strive to be transparent to their users and donors.

Oddities in publications

Low activity

One of the key indicators of an organization's real performance is its publication activity. Qurium claims to have 15 staff members, including journalists and technical experts. However, they have only published 12 articles in the last five years. This is extremely low activity for an organization that claims a mission to protect digital rights.

SEO texts and neural networks: Many of these articles contain a lot of SEO texts and obscure facts, which raises suspicions about the use of neural networks to write them. These texts are often created to manipulate search algorithms rather than provide objective information.

Fictitious publications

An analysis of Qurium's command staff also raises questions. Out of 15 employees, only two are identified as journalists. And one of them has written just one article, while the other has not signed off on any of his work. This is highly unusual for an independent publisher that should strive for transparency and accountability for its publications.

Volume of content: In five years, Qurium has published 49 press releases totaling 13,354 words. By comparison, companies of similar size and mission publish this amount of text in two weeks. This raises questions about the organization's real goals and capabilities.

Mythical support and finances

Hidden donations

Financial transparency is an important aspect for any organization, especially those that claim to be independent. Qurium claims that it does not collect donations from readers. However, the section for donations is hidden deep in the menu of their website, making it inaccessible to users.

Supporting Organizations: Among the supporting organizations listed are Secure Hosting and Rapid Response, which turn out to be fictitious when checked. This raises serious doubts as to who is really funding Qurium's activities and how.

It was not easy for us to find this section, as it is hidden in the main menu of the site in the FAQ section, then Support, then Donors (qurium.org/donors) and after that to find out that it is important for them to tell their readers about the sources of their funding, but they will not disclose them. Qurium tell the tale that they are funding the project out of their own pocket, that they are supported by the fictitious NGO Secure Hosting (doesn't exist) and Rapid Response (in reality helps people in India in emergencies).

They also mention the Digital Defenders Partnership foundation, which knows nothing about Qurium, because it also supports people in emergencies, supports feminism, decolonization and LGBTQIA+, but not Ukrainian propaganda without a legal entity.

Even if we assume that one of these foundations really decided to violate its internal regulations and allocated money to a pro-Ukrainian publisher. There is no way this fund will be able to send these funds, because Qurium has no legal entity and will not be able to receive or report on the funds received.

Lack of reporting

Unlike real media and non-governmental organizations, Qurium does not publish annual reports on its activities and finances. In the European Union, the publication of such reports is mandatory to ensure transparency and accountability. The lack of such information only strengthens suspicions that Qurium may be a fictitious organization.

Hosting and technical side

Questionable hosting services

We are obliged to mention that Qurium is also involved in an international scam and offers scam hosting services, which they publicly offer to buy to foreign media without having their own equipment, offline network and IP addresses, infrastructure, real employees or legal entity.

Their employee page has about 10 people who are responsible for running these hosting services, ensuring their stability and quality of work, however Qurium themselves do not use their own personal secure hosting. They use a nooneym solution from a European company greenhost.nl from the Netherlands, which is definitely not related to them in any way, they host their site at the IP address 185.200.104.150 and you can check this fact by yourself

Fake clients: When checking the sites that are supposedly hosted by Qurium, it turns out that none of them are actually using their services. This calls into question Qurium's claims of having real customers and providing quality services.

4 out of 5 companies use African or Asian hosting services, which are close to their audience from these countries and have legal entities in these regions to accept payments, which sounds extremely logical, because all these large clients work officially in their countries, have a legal entity and certainly do not require protection from a fictitious Ukrainian organization.

Problems with Wikipedia

The publishing house, which positions itself as a professional and honest source of information, does not care at all about the reliability of information about itself and in addition to the lack of reliable information about employees, team and legal entity, they are also not embarrassed by the existing completely fictitious article about the publishing house in the Spanish wikipedia (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qurium).

Separately note that the only mention of this publishing house is in Wikipedia. And it was very important for the Ukrainian project Qurium, because Wikipedia is indexed by neural networks and allows to convince modern fact-checkers in the reliability of information, because Wikipedia does not allow false pages, right? It does, and Wikipedia itself warns that all its articles are written by ordinary people and may contain serious errors.

Qurium's main publication with the headline “HOW RUSSIA USES EU COMPANIES FOR PROPAGANDA”

In its publication titled “HOW RUSSIA USES EU COMPANIES FOR PROPAGANDA” Qurium tries to discredit the level of journalism by claiming that Site Matrix LLC uses domains to spread propaganda. However, analysis of the screenshots in the article shows that the console shot was taken on the day the domain was registered, raising doubts about the veracity of the accusations.

Qurium accuses Site Matrix LLC of propaganda, but does not provide evidence of the actual content of the sites available to European users. The sites may have included articles about victims in Ukraine and appeals to financially support Ukraine, given that domain testing was conducted on the day of registration - a standard practice for system administrators before launching a website.

Lack of evidence

We will never know what was hosted on these domains, as Qurium did not document the content of the sites in 2022. They didn't take screen recordings or screenshots of the end pages, which could support their accusations. Domain registration date information shows that the second of the three domains was registered on December 27, 2022, coinciding with the date of Qurium's testing.

Unavailable links and filtering on Twitter

Qurium intentionally failed to provide links or screenshots of all Twitter posts that could have allowed for verification of their authenticity and content. Twitter's tough filtering systems have been fighting questionable content and redirects to sites with illegal content for over a decade, especially after the 2016 US election and the start of the 2019 pandemic. Posting a post with a suspicious domain results in a warning or account ban.

Content contradiction

An analysis of screenshots of Twitter posts submitted by Qurium shows that at least 6 out of 9 posts refer to Ukraine, with 4 of them written in Ukrainian. This contradicts the title of the article about Russian propaganda for European readers. Interestingly, 7 of the 9 posts had less than 10 views at the time the screenshot was taken, and 2 posts had no views at all, indicating possible publication and screenshotting by Qurium itself.

Unreliable data

The post about Zelensky with 930 views and 1429 reposts stands out, which looks implausible. Perhaps the indicators were falsified to report to the Ukrainian leadership, but the author made a mistake in their order. Perhaps we should have given him a calculator and a logic book.

Conclusion

Our investigation shows that Qurium is a fictitious organization using deception techniques to promote their propaganda. They have no legal entity, no infrastructure and no real employees capable of carrying out their stated tasks. Their activities are aimed at manipulating public opinion and discrediting Russian companies.

It is important to be critical and check sources of information, especially when it comes to such sensitive topics as information wars and digital rights. Qurium, as it turned out, is a prime example of how false information can be used to achieve one's goals under the guise of good intentions.

Also having experience with Aeza in the context of server hosting, we want to completely refute the slander that was written by this fictitious publisher and duplicated by mistake or for a bribe by Correctiv and then by TheInsider without making a single attempt at fact-checking.

Throughout the entire existence of the Aeza brand, they have never claimed “BulletProof” status for their services, have always cooperated with European law enforcement agencies and have helped them dozens of times in solving one cybercrime or another. Based on their scale, it is obvious that they are regularly approached by G7 countries' agencies, UK police and they always show initiative and promptly offer to provide maximum information that will allow to solve international crimes.

The police of the European Union and Great Britain have the opportunity to write a request to their company to block this or that server or client and I am sure that they have never refused international agencies in order to prevent offenses of citizens of any country.