Cyberattacks reveal Turkey’s weaknesses
Computer servers in Turkey have been the targets of a major cyberattack for the past two weeks.
Turkish media outlets report that more than 400,000 websites registered under Turkey’s Internet country top-level domain ".tr" are experiencing problems. Since Dec. 14, the computer servers of government agencies and private entities, including the country’s three largest Internet service providers, have suffered systematic cyberattacks. Most Turkish banks and their credit card terminals could not perform any transactions on Dec. 25, and as of Dec. 29 the virtual onslaught was continuing.
According to the Ankara-based Network Information Center, which administers the registry of sites under the “.tr” domain, the cyberattacks against Turkey are of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) kind. In a DDoS scenario, hackers take over multiple computers remotely, send continuous requests to overwhelm the targeted server and deny it the ability to fulfill its duty — be it providing news stories, banking services or video-streaming.
