Anonymous Takes On Turkey National Police, Leaks Huge Data Trove To ‘Take Action Against Corruption’

Hacktivist collective Anonymous released a large amount of data pertaining to the Turkish police Monday, to “take action against corruption” in the country. A hacker who goes by the name The Cthulhu leaked the data less than two months after Anonymous carried out cyberattacks targeting Turkish banks and government websites for the country’s alleged ties to the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.

The hacker shared a compressed file of 2.8GB and an uncompressed one of 17.8GB on their website. According to The Cthulhu, the data was received from another hacker who had “persistent access to various parts of the Turkish government infrastructure for the past two years.” The leak was “in light of various government abuses in the past few months” in Turkey, the hacktivist claimed.

Last December, Anonymous carried out cyberattacks on Turkish internet servers for a week, stating it would continue the attack if Ankara "doesn't stop supporting" ISIS. About 400,000 websites in Turkey went offline following the internet assault, which stopped after the country stopped foreign internet traffic to its ".tr" domain.

"We won't accept that [President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, the leader of Turkey, will help ISIS any longer. … Dear Government of Turkey, if you don't stop supporting ISIS, we will continue attacking your internet, your root DNS, your banks and take your government sites down. After the root DNS we will start to hit your airports, military assets and private state connections. We will destroy your critical banking infrastructure. Stop this insanity now, Turkey. Your fate is in your hands," Anonymous said at the time, in a video posted on YouTube.