Turkey Arrests 32 Anonymous Hacker Suspects

Turkey has arrested 32 suspects believed to be linked to the Anonmyous group of hackers, following an online protest against the country’s proposal for Internet filters.

The arrests followed the detention of three Anonymous suspects in Spain last week, and are in response to attacks on a number of Turkish government websites, according to reports in the state-owned Anatolia news agency.

Hackers protest Turkish filters

The Turkish authorities made co-ordinated raids in twelve Turkish cities, after government websites came under attack. Hacktivists had hit the sites of the country’s telecoms watchdog, BTK, as well as the prime minister’s office and parliament, following Turkey’s plans to introduce Internet filters. BTK said the attack had caused minimal disruption as it was prepared for it.

The Anonymous group of politically motivated hackers came to prominence after it engaged in denial of service attacks in support of the WikiLeaks whistleblower site. These included attacks which brought down the websites of PayPal and Mastercard, and on HBGary, a security firm Anonymous called an “FBI snitch“.

Anonymous has also been accused of the Sony Playstation network hack and attacks on government websites in Zimbabwe and Tunisia.

In January the British police arrested five Anonymous suspects, having investigated the group for some time.  The FBI has issued forty arrest warrants.

However, doubts have been raised over whether those arrested in Spain and Turkey have any great involvement in Anonymous. It appears that the Spanish suspects may be simply users of the LOIC tool, which Anonymous recommends for distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, who did not cover their tracks sufficiently.