Cyber Attack Spread to Yüksekova News Site
On 18 May (Thursday), the website of Sol Haber ('Left-wing News') became temporarily unusable due to a cyber attack. Two days later (20 May), the website of the Yüksekova News daily (Hakkari, south-eastern Turkey) became the latest target for the time being in a series of cyber attacks on news portals. In a statement posted on the website, it was announced that the service was temporarily inaccessible due to a cyber attack:
"The official website of the Yüksekova News newspaper is temporarily inaccessible because of a cyber attack carried out throughout the past couple of days. YuksekovaHaber.com became the target of attacks several times in the past. Currently, the site is facing an attack carried out via a minimum of one thousand IP addresses".
"Efforts of the Yüksekova News technical service to prevent the attack and determine its source are still being continued. We apologize to our readers for the inconvenience. We kindly inform the public that this attack is not going to distract us from our path".
Access to the website of the Istanbul-based left-wing Birgün newspaper was rendered almost impossible on 16 May on the grounds of a cyber attack.
Identical source
After the cyber attacks on the websites of bianet.org and of Sol Haber on 17 and 18 May respectively, bianet talked to Murat Demirten from the Yenihayat IT Company that provides service to bianet.org. Access to the bianet.org site was prevented due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) caused by a very large number of computers that were connected to the server at the same time.
"We can say that the source of the attacks on both sites were more or less the same. The requests coming from the IP addresses used within Turkey were the same for both attacks; most of the used IP addresses were the same", Demirten explained.
"However, we have to add that the attacks were not carried out in the same ways. We encountered different characteristic specifications. Thus, there might be more than one source. (...) The difficult part is to extricate the requests of the real users from the demands of the ones used for the attack." (ŞA/VK)