On Friday night, a vast majority of Turks was disconnected from the Internet for a couple of hours.
We have recently discovered what had actually happened that night, after a few denials from the government side.
Some international hacktivists from the Anonymous had organized a cyberattack against the websites of the Turkish police and the Ministry of Justice. They announced that they did it in solidarity with RedHack, a Turkish leftist online group founded in 1997. "An attack on Redhack is an attack on free information, a free press, and free expression," Anonymous said in a YouTube video.
Then hilarity ensued...
Turkish authorities couldn't stop the Anonymous attack. So, they literally pulled the plug of Turkey's Internet. It meant that for almost two hours, millions of Turkish users who accessed the Internet through the servers connected to Turk Telekom, were surfing in a "national intranet," as all connections abroad were shut off.
At that point, RedHack members inside Turkey, supported the Anonymous operation with a fifth column attack inside Turkey, they allege. According to their claim, Turkish authorities were even more panicked then, so they restarted the whole system belonged to Turk Telekom, which meant that even the "national intranet" was gone for millions of users now. Hence, millions of computers were disconnected completely.
Although Turkish authorities still defend that it was just a "technical glitch", I personally find the claims of the hacktivists a bit more probable, considering the facts that:
1) Anonymous and RedHack had announced the exact timing of the attack beforehand. It seems like an highly unlikely coincidence to experience the glitch exactly on that time.
2) The government is notorious in its heavy-handed approach to fight cybercrime, as can be seen from its anti-democratic practices like the absurd ban on my own personal website and its dubious Internet filter.
Posts
