Anonymous takes credit for massive cyberattack on Turkey

Hacking collective Anonymous is claiming responsibility for a slew of cyberattacks on Turkey’s Internet that took down hundreds of thousands of the country’s websites.

In a video, the loosely organized hactivist group accused Turkey of supporting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), something the government has repeatedly denied.

{mosads}Anonymous recently declared cyber war on ISIS in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, which left 130 people dead.

“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,” said a voice in the since removed video posted to an Anonymous YouTube channel, according to several reports.

“After the root DNS we will start to hit your airports, military assets and private state connections,” it added. “We will destroy your critical banking infrastructure.”

Earlier this month, Turkish servers were bombarded for more than a week with some of the most intense cyberattacks in the country’s history.

The servers were under fire from a series of distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, in which hackers attempt to crash websites with massive volumes of fake traffic.

“The attack left more than 400,000 websites down in Turkey,” said security research firm Radware in a blog post this week.

The government eventually had to cut off all foreign Internet traffic coming to “.tr” websites, the domain for Turkey, to mitigate the assault, Radware said.

Turkey has faced criticism for not proactively going after ISIS, especially given its geographic proximity to Syria and Iraq.

President Obama has publicly pressed the country to better secure its border with Syria. U.S. officials have also expressed frustration that Turkey is not policing the oil-smuggling trade that goes through Turkey and helps fund the extremist fighters.

Anonymous has jumped on these details as evidence that Turkey is “supporting ISIS.”

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