Cyber-Attack on the Turkish Internet

The Anonymous hacktivist group has taken responsibility for a powerful cyber-attack on the Turkish sector of the internet this week. It promised to continue waging cyber warfare on .tr domains until Ankara stops the “insanity” of supporting Daesh (Islamic State).

The massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Turkish websites last week, initially attributed to spooky “Russian hackers,” has been clarified with Anonymous issuing a video claiming responsibility and declaring cyber war on Turkey for supporting terrorists of Daesh (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

The DDoS attack (measured in gigabits per second, or plainly how much traffic is being sent to a site) on Turkish DNS servers reached 40 Gbps, quite enough to shut down altogether any domain.

The attack began on December 14. Turkish media alleged that 400,000 .tr domains were forced offline.

The affected websites were able to return online only after Turkey’s leading National Response Center for Cyber Events cut off all incoming international traffic to the .tr websites, thus shutting down national “internet borders,” completely and denying “anybody outside the country access to Turkish websites,” Anonymous pointed out.

“This mass cyber-attack is known to be the biggest so far with the intensity of slowing down the websites,” ODTÜ Computer Engineering Professor Attila Özgit said as cited by Hurriyet Daily News.