On December 14, 2015 Turkey has started experiencing a range of DDoS attacks targeting over 400,000 .tr websites including government, military and public servers. Binali Yıldırım, Minister of Transport, Maritime and Communication of Turkey, commented that the attacks originated from abroad. In response National Computer Emergency Response Center (USOM, TR-CERT) of Turkey blocked access to all foreign incoming traffic. A day later the ban was lifted and only selected IP addresses were blocked.
“As of now this cyberattack is known to be the most intense that resulted in massive slow down of Turkish websites,” ODTÜ – the Middle East Technical University – Computer Engineering Professor Attila Özgit added.
Transportation Minister Binali Yıldırım blamed the the Middle East Technical University, reported Hürriyet Daily News. “We have seen with this attack that ODTÜ did not take sufficient measures,” Yıldırım said, while stressing the importance for cooperation.
Some speculated the attacks could be perpetuated by the Russian hackers a result of recent Turkey’s shoot down of a Russian military jet that violated Turkish airspace and failed to respond to 10 warnings.
Meanwhile, the “Anonymous” – the international hacking group – released a video threatening to conduct more extensive attacks as result of their opposition to Erdogan’s support of ISIS (aka Daesh) since Turkey was buying oil from the Islamic State, along with other funding – an allegation that Ankara denies.
On December 24, 2015 a number of Turkish banks came under another DDoS cyberattack. While the attack didn’t involve any serious security breaches since the hackers did not hack into banking databases, access to online banking services of several major Turkish banks was restricted along with some disruption to credit card transactions.
Türk Telekom, Turkey’s leading ISP, explained that “We are expecting another big attack from both within and outside Turkey,” but all the necessary measures have been taken to better cope with such attacks in the future.