Turkish intelligence says 'no damage after hacking'

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Anonymous started the hashtag #OpSupportRedHack to show support for RedHack.

Turkish security sources told Hürriyet Daily News today that no critical information was obtained by hackers during yesterday's attack and the National Intelligence Agency (MİT) website was rendered inaccessible for several minutes. 

International hacking organization Anonymous crashed websites belonging to the Turkish police and intelligence services yesterday in a show of support for the Turkey-based socialist RedHack group.

RedHack said Anonymous staged the attack in reaction to a Turkish prosecutor’s call for the leftist hacker group to be declared “terrorists.”

Anonymous is planning greater attacks against Turkish governmental websites, a member of RedHack told the Hürriyet Daily News yesterday after the downing of two websites.

“[A Turkish prosecutor] has included us on a terrorist group list. Anonymous is supporting us as a reaction to that and also for seven innocent people who have been jailed in a probe against us,” the member said.

A prosecutor demanded that RedHack be recognized as a “terrorist organization” after the group hacked into Turkish Foreign Ministry databases on July 3. RedHack had disclosed the identities of all foreign diplomatic personnel working in Turkey in a bid to protest the “Turkish government’s meddling in Syria” and to “commemorate the 19th anniversary of the Sivas Massacre.” Turkish authorities closed down RedHack’s Twitter account after the incident, which had more than 40,000 followers.
“These are only warning messages, if innocent people are not freed [we] will conduct greater operations,” the hacker team added.

The website www.egm.gov.tr, which belongs to the Turkish Police Department, was rendered inaccessible, as were the subpages of the website of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MİT), www.mit.gov.tr.

The hacker team also accused the Turkish police of lending support to certain hacker groups that have been targeting Turkish journalists and academics.

Anonymous started the hashtag #OpSupportRedHack on Twitter and announced that it was targeting Turkish government websites in a show of “solidarity” with RedHack.

Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communications Authority (BTK) said “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks forced the websites to crash.

“Many sources like servers and PCs are targeting websites with some special software,” a BTK official told daily Hürriyet, adding that the websites’ inability to respond to the attacks had allowed the hackers to reach their goal.