Justice

Anonymous Just Declared War on Turkey

December 23rd 2015

Internet servers in Turkey have been under a sustained attack over the past week, with management companies fearing political motivations, and hackers associating themselves withthe group Anonymous claiming responsibility.

A video message released over the weekend bearing the marks of the hacker-activist collectivesaid the cyber attacks would continue if Turkey continued their alleged support of the self-proclaimed terrorist group Islamic State.

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"Turkey is supporting Daesh by buying oil from them, and hospitalizing their fighters," the video states, using an Arabic term for the group. "We won't accept that Erdoğan, the leader of Turkey, will help [IS] any longer."

The group accused Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of involvement in providing financial support to Islamic State militants in the form of oil money and medical assistance to wounded fighters. Others, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, have made similar claims — all of which Turkey has denied. The hackers claiming to represent Anonymous warned of continued attacks if the support did not stop.

You can watch the full statement here:

“We will continue attacking your internet, your root DNS, your banks and take your government sites down,” the video states.“ After the root DNS, we will start to hit your airports, military assets and private state connections. We will destroy your critical banking infrastructure."

While server administrators said the attacks were only traceable as far as coming from "organized sources" outside Turkey, some speculated that they could have originated from Russia. The two countries have had tense relations in recent weeks, after Turkish forces shot down a Russian fighter jet in November in a no-fly zone on the Syrian border.

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Nic.tr, a non-government firm that monitors websites with the domain, ".tr," including government websites and banks, said web speeds for some sites were slowed significantly after thousands of computers directed traffic to specific targets, in what is known as a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS,attack.

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