‘Anonymous’ Hackers Group Attack Turkey, Turkish Officials Attempt to Counteract

Websites in Turkey have been the latest subject of cyberattacks as elections approach quickly in the country, according to a Reuters report on June 9.

The group claiming responsibility, known as Anonymous, is an enigmatic and loosely organized group of “internet vigilantes”.

According to the report, Anonymous is attacking official Turkish websites in order to end internet censorship there. Turkish officials have promised to direct the efforts of their own national security teams to counterattacking Anonymous-affiliated websites.

Unfortunately for Turkish authorities, attacking Anonymous is a lot harder to do than it sounds. Or perhaps it does sound about right.

Anonymous is not a definite organization with a set structure or even a set membership. The name of the group itself refers to an internet meme which originated on the image message board, 4chan, used to represent the anonymous identity of the 4chan community as a whole.

Anonymous generally grew to encompass the personally separated nature of all “chan” image board communities. The communities themselves encompass thousands of miscellaneous computer users and internet surfers who communicate through the chan boards in the interest of sharing images for humor, design, and many other purposes. However all posts to the chan boards are listed as Anonymous, hence the name.

Anyone can be a member of Anonymous as long as that person can simply access a board and contribute to or join discussions. Also in this sense, Anonymous cannot be individually targeted as a hacker group with ease.

The dilemma is equivalent to stepping into a cafe with tens of thousands of people, knowing that some indeterminate number of them are not coffee-drinkers, and attempting to figure who they are and how many there are with each of them claiming to be a coffee-drinker and unaware that there are any other non-coffee-drinkers in the building.

When targeting other websites, efforts generally start with one or more unknown and anonymous users initiating the idea and gathering a core of equally unknown anonymous supporters. Their attacks are then mass-coordinated based on the goals of the general group, normally composed entirely of people who do not actually know the identities of one another.

Efforts directed outward at other websites may include anything from simple “trolling”—posting or commenting offensive or insulting things in discussions and public forums in order to generate discontent—to full-out Denial of Services (DoS) attacks designed to overwhelm a website or server’s ability to handle traffic.