ISTANBUL/MADRID – Turkish police have detained 32 members of the Anonymous cyberactivism collective on suspicion of planning attacks on a number of websites, Turkish state-run news agency Anatolian reported.
The action came in response to a complaint from Turkey’s directorate of telecommunications, whose website was taken down last Thursday as part of a protest against what Anonymous said was government censorship of the Internet.
Turkey, whose ruling AK Party won a general election on Sunday, plans to introduce a new internet-filtering system in August, under which users will have to sign up for one of four filters – domestic, family, children and standard.
Anonymous, a loose activist collective which has attacked many websites, including those of Amazon and Mastercard, in the name of internet freedom, said the system would make it possible to keep records of people’s online activity.
Eight of the 32 suspected cyberactivists detained on Sunday were minors, Anatolian said.
The police operation in Turkey follows the arrest of three so-called “Anons” in Spain last Friday on suspicion of organising cyber attacks against the websites of Sony, banks and governments.
Anonymous said on its website (www.anonops.blogspot.com) and on a video posted on YouTube that the arrest had not shut down the leadership of its operations as claimed, because the group had no centralised leadership.
The group said it had taken down the Spanish national police website for some hours on Saturday in retaliation.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the US Senate’s website was hacked over the weekend, leading to a review of all of its sites, in the latest embarrassing breach of security to hit a major US-based institution.
The loosely organised hacker group Lulz Security broke into a public portion of the Senate website but did not reach behind a firewall into a more sensitive portion of the network, Martina Bradford, the deputy Senate sergeant at arms, said on Monday. Lulz announced the hack yesterday.
“We were responding to their allegations. Basically what we’re saying is that the server they got into is for public access and is in the public side,” said Bradford.
Lulz Security, which has hacked in to Sony’s website and the US Public Broadcasting System, posted online a list of files that appear not to be sensitive but indicate the hackers had been into the Senate’s computer network.
“We don’t like the US government very much,” Lulz Security said at the top of its release. “This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov – is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?” The comment refers to reports that the US military had decided that it could respond to cyber attacks from foreign countries with traditional military force. – (Reuters)