Turkey arrests 32 Anonymous hackers for DDOS attacks

Turkey responded to the hacking group Anonymous with 32 arrests following attacks on government websites, according to the country's state-run news agency.

The Anadolu Agency wrote the alleged Anonymous members were arrested in 12 cities, including Ankara and Istanbul.
[ Also on InfoWorld: HBGary's CTO discussed lessons from the Anonymous hack. | And last week Anonymous hacked an Indian government site to fight corruption. | The Web browser is your portal to the world -- as well as the conduit that lets in many security threats. InfoWorld's expert contributors show you how to secure your Web browsers in this "Web Browser Security Deep Dive" PDF guide. ]

Turkey is the latest country to make arrests connected with Anonymous, a decentralized group of activists who conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) against organizations and businesses that the group opposes. The attacks seek to make websites unavailable.
On Friday, Spain said it concluded its first policing action against Anonymous, arresting three people who allegedly directed DDOS attacks on banks, government websites and companies including Sony.

Also on Friday, Anonymous said through its website, AnonOps Communications, that its attacks against Turkish government websites were in protest of "plans to implement a filter on Internet browsing" in August. Activists took to the streets in 30 cities in Turkey in May to protest the plans.
"Over the last few years, we have witnessed the censorship taken by the Turkish government, such as blocking YouTube, Rapidshare, Fileserve and thousands of other websites," according to the statement. "Most recently, the government banned access to Google services. These acts of censorship are inexcusable."

Anonymous said the strikes will be executed using the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, an easy-to-use tool for DDOS attacks but one that security experts has said is not difficult for law enforcement to trace who is using it.

Targets included Turkey's telecommunications directorate, which appeared to be offline on Monday morning, and the country's social security institution, Anonymous wrote.

On Saturday, Anonymous wrote that it had retaliated against Spanish police by launching what it said was a successful DDOS against that organization's website for several hours. The site, however, was functioning on Monday morning.