Anonymous Shuts Down 400,000 Of Turkey’s Government Websites For Supporting ISIS


On December 21st, the self-proclaimed hacktivist group Anonymous claimed responsibility for a massive cyber attack on Turkish servers, which resulted in 400,000 websites being shut down. The large-scale DDoS attack was carried out as part of a campaign against the Turkish government for their continued support of the Islamic State, reports RT.

#OpTurkey reached 40 Gbps (gigabits per second, or how much traffic is being sent to a site), enough to shut down altogether any domain.

Reportedly, the attack began on December 14 and came to a halt one week later. In seven days, 400,000 .tr domains were forced offline, according to Turkish media. Only after Turkey’s leading National Response Center for Cyber Events cut off all incoming international traffic to the .tr websites were they finally able to return online. This denied “anybody outside the country access to Turkish websites,” says Anonymous.

“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.

The group shares in the video above that the attack on Turkey was conducted within the framework of the counterterrorist cyber option #OpISIS. The attacks will continue, says Anonymous, until Ankara revises its policies toward Islamic extremists.

The recorded message follows:

Greetings citizens of the world,

We are Anonymous.

As many of you have heard, Turkey is supporting Daesh by buying oil from them, and hospitalizing their fighters.

We won’t accept that Erdogan, the leader of Turkey, will help ISIS any longer. The news media has already stated that Turkey’s Internet has been the victim of massive DDOS attacks. This lead Turkey to shut down it’s internet borders and deny anybody outside the country to access Turkish websites.

Dear government of Turkey,

If you don’t stop supporting ISIS, we will continue attacking your internet, your ROOT DNS , your banks and take your government sites down.

After the root dns we will start to hit your airports, military assets, and private state connections. We will destroy your critical banking infrastructure

Stop this insanity now Turkey. Your fate is in your own hands.

We Are Anonymous

We Are Legion

We Do Not Forgive

We do not forget.

Expect us.

#OpISIS #OpTurkey

The hacktivists also warned the government that if Turkey didn’t stop aiding Daesh or ISIS the attacks will continue and target airports, banks, government and military servers.

“Stop this insanity now, Turkey,” the group said in the video. “Your fate is in your hands.”

This isn’t the first time the hacktivist group has shut down a government’s websites to prove a point. In November, for example, five of Iceland’s government websites were shut down in protest of the nation’s continued allowance of whale hunting.

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