Hactivist group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for a series of cyberattacks on Turkey’s internet resulting in the crashing of hundreds of thousands of the country’s websites. In a video, Anonymous accused Turkey of supporting ISIS, which the government itself has repeatedly denied. Anonymous has also declared cyber war on ISIS in response to the Paris attacks stating “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.”
The attacks were performed through a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks which occurs when hackers crash websites with massive volumes of fake traffic. The attack reportedly took down more than 400,000 websites in the country but Anonymous does not plan to stop there. The hactivist group also claimed “after the root DNS we will start to hit your airports, military assets and private state connections […] We will destroy your critical banking infrastructure.” While Turkey has denied being affiliated with ISIS, President Obama has publicly urged the country to tighten its border with Syria.