Turkish sites under intensifying, weeks long DDoS attacks that disrupted some banking services over the holidays; Anonymous claims responsibility
not Anonymous—cripple Turkey's Internet? Telegraph : Anonymous claims responsibility for massive cyberattack on Turkey Jon Fingas / Engadget : Anonymous takes credit for cyberattacks crippling Turkey Reuters : Turkish banks fend off cyberattacks, some transactions hit Rob Thubron / TechSpot : Anonymous claims it is behind massive cyberattack campaign against Turkey Daniel Smith / Radware Blog : Turkey DNS Servers Under Attack Daily Mail : Anonymous launches cyber attack on Turkey after accusing it of supporting ISIS by buying oil … Andrew Brennan / CJAD 800 : WATCH: Anonymous targets Turkey alleging it supports ISIS Hurriyet Daily News : Turkish banks under cyberattack amid crisis with Russia Hurriyet Daily News : Turkey recovers from cyberattack amid criticism of solution TodaysZaman : Cyber threat could drag on and haunt Turkey, experts warn Hurriyet Daily News : Anonymous claims cyberattacks on Turkey, declares cyber-war Leah Barkoukis / Townhall.com : Anonymous Claims Responsibility for Massive Cyberattack Against Turkey Sputnik International : Turkish Banks Hit by Cyber Attack Days After Anonymous Vows War
Context & Ripple Effects
The holiday DDoS wave is the sharpest flashpoint yet in a running confrontation between Ankara and its online critics. Earlier in 2015, Turkey threatened to block Twitter unless it removed an account circulating leaked documents — a dispute over information control that frames how the government reads this attack. Now Anonymous, citing Turkey's alleged oil purchases from ISIS, has spent weeks hammering the country's sites, with Radware reporting the campaign also hit Turkish DNS servers.
What makes this worth tracking beyond the claim of responsibility is the infrastructure involved. DNS sits upstream of everything else, and the same protocol surfaces again in later coverage when Turkey-backed hackers are found using DNS hijacking against governments and organizations — evidence that both attackers and defenders treat name resolution as the chokepoint.
First-order effects
- Turkish banks spent the holiday period fending off the attacks, with some transactions disrupted at one of the busiest retail windows of the year.
- Turkey's DNS servers came under fire alongside the site floods, forcing recovery work while the government's response drew public criticism.
Second-order effects
- A government that already leaned on ISPs for content control now has a security justification to tighten further — a path it later followed by ordering ISPs to block access to 16 VPN services ahead of the March 2024 elections.
- Turkish financial institutions must absorb recurring outage risk into their operations budgeting, pushing spend toward traffic-scrubbing capacity and away from customer-facing investment.
Third-order effects
- Hacktivist flooding and state-backed DNS manipulation converge on the same layer: as coverage later showed Turkey-linked operators using DNS hijacking for credential theft, name resolution is becoming the contested ground where political and criminal pressure on a national internet meets.
The trend: National internet infrastructure — and DNS in particular — is becoming the battleground where hacktivist DDoS campaigns and state-level control measures increasingly overlap.