Health ministry confirms cyberattack attempt on Turkish state hospitals

EDİRNE - Doğan News Agency

The Health Ministry has announced that there were attempts to conduct a cyberattack targeting the databases of hospitals in the provinces of Diyarbakır, Siirt and Tekirdağ.

The ministry stated that only hospitals in Diyarbakır were "partly affected" by the cyberattack, adding that an investigation was now underway into the attack.

It also stressed that no information had been lost due to its back-up mechanism.

Earlier reports had suggested that international hacking collective Anonymous staged a cyberattack targeting hospitals.

The collective reportedly hacked into the systems of state hospitals operating under the Health Ministry and deleted all information on the databases after copying them.

A total of 33 hospitals were reportedly affected by the cyberattack, which brought operations on their systems to a complete halt.

The authorities reportedly tried to reload backed-up data, but the hacking group apparently prevented this by preemptively blocking restoring.

All registrations at affected hospitals on May 18 had to be conducted by hand following the cyberattack.

Turkey previously experienced a week-long cyberattack in December 2015, in which nearly 400,000 websites with the extension “.tr.” were targed.

Anonymous had claimed responsibility for that cyberattack, accusing Turkey of supporting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and threatening additional attacks in the event that this alleged support continued.