Leaked emails from the Turkish government reportedly document Turkey’s use of pro-government trolls on Twitter, which is also now being used to document the censorship.
RedHack, a Marxist hacker group, claimed to have hacked personal email accounts of Turkey’s Energy Minister and President Erdoğan’s son-in-law,Berat Albayrak. They threatened to leak data if Turkey did not release leftist dissidents, including Kurdish political party HDP’s deputy, Alp Antınörs, and renowned novelist Aslı Erdoğan, from pre-trial detention.
As an attempt to block citizens’ access to such information, Turkey has blocked access to Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and partially restricted Google Drive cloud file sharing services. Both Google Drive and Dropbox services were issuing SSL errors, indicating intercepted traffic at the national or ISP level. Microsoft OneDrive was also subsequently blocked off throughout Turkey.
GitHub was also blocked last night, according to a status update from the group. Google Drive was even displaying an official notice from the Turkish government’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority describing their block as an “administration measure” — although another Twitter update this morning says Google Drive is now back online after Google complied with the government’s takedown order.
Redhack is a hacker group founded in 1997. The group has claimed responsibility for hacking institutions which include the Council of Higher Education, Turkish police forces, the Turkish Army, Türk Telekom, and theNational Intelligence Organization and many other websites. The group’s core membership is said to number twelve; the leader’s pseudonym is MaNYaK.
RedHack is the first hacker group which has been accused of being a terrorist organization and is currently one of the world’s most wanted hacker groups.
