Hackers Working for Turkey Believed to Carry out Sweeping Cyberattacks

Reuters exclusively quoted three senior security officials that it is widely believed that some sweeping internet cyber attacks targeting governments and other institutions in Europe and the Middle East, were carried out by hackers working for the Turkish government.

According to a Reuters review of public Internet records, hackers have infiltrated at least 30 institutions, including ministries, embassies, and security services, as well as other companies and organizations.

Records showed that those attacks targetted the e-mail services of Cyprus, the Greek government and the national security adviser to the Iraqi government.

The attacks included intercepting data flows on the sites of the intended targets, which enabled hackers to illegally enter the networks of government agencies and other institutions.

British and US officials say that these activities bear the hallmarks of a state-supported online espionage operation that has been implemented to support Turkish interests.

"Conclusion was based on three elements: the identities and locations of the victims, which included governments of countries that are geopolitically significant to Turkey; similar to previous attacks that they say were used infrastructure registered from Turkey; and information contained in confidential intelligence assessments that they declined to give more details," the officials added.

According to public Internet records seen by Reuters, cyber attacks took place in Cyprus, Greece and Iraq in late 2018 and early 2019.

The sources and investigators working independently in the field of Internet security said that the broader series of attacks is still continuing.

Records also showed that the attacks have been taking place since early 2018. The three officials and two other US intelligence officials said that although these types of attacks carried out by manipulating the Internet Domain Name System (DNS) are common on a smaller level, the scale of those attacks has worried Western intelligence services.