Hacktivist group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for a massive cyber attack against Turkey that took down hundreds of thousands of websites in the country.
Anonymous claimed to have carried out the attacks over Turkey’s support of the Islamic State, despite the fact that the government has repeatedly denied helping the terror group.
"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,” said a voice a video posted to an Anonymous YouTube channel, which has since been removed.
"After the root DNS we will start to hit your airports, military assets and private state connections,” it added. “We will destroy your critical banking infrastructure."
Earlier this month, Turkish servers were bombarded for more than a week with some of the most intense cyberattacks in the country’s history.
The servers were under fire from a series of distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, in which hackers attempt to crash websites with massive volumes of fake traffic.
“The attack left more than 400,000 websites down in Turkey,” said security research firm Radware in a blog post this week.
The government eventually had to cut off all foreign Internet traffic coming to “.tr” websites, the domain for Turkey, to mitigate the assault, Radware said.
Turkey has faced criticism for not proactively going after ISIS, especially given its geographic proximity to Syria and Iraq.
President Obama has publicly pressed the country to better secure its border with Syria. U.S. officials have also expressed frustration that Turkey is not policing the oil-smuggling trade that goes through Turkey and helps fund the extremist fighters.
Anonymous declared “war” on ISIS after the terror attacks in Paris in November that left 129 people dead.
"Stop this insanity now, Turkey,” the voice said in the video. “Your fate is in your hands."
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