Hacker group says to have ‘friends’ in anti-hacker team

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Some of the engineers appointed to this anti-hacker team are our friends’ says a member of RedHack.

Redhack, a Turkish hacking group, has laughed off the Turkish government’s efforts to secure its online infrastructure against international and domestic hacking attacks by deploying a new 150-member team, claiming it has “friends” on the Cyber Security Institution’s team.

“Some of the engineers appointed to this anti-hacker team are our friends. On the other hand, fighting against an ‘army’ of 150 engineers will be good for our own education too,” a ReadHack member told Hürriyet Daily News yesterday via instant messaging.

“RedHack consists of 12 members and has millions of supporters, as against the government’s team of 150,” the RedHack member said while sarcastically criticizing Turkey’s Transportation and Communication Ministry and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK).

“We can change our tactics from now on. Maybe we will attack and [publish messages] on government web pages in French; then they would hire some French teachers, too,” the RedHack member said. The hacker group RedHack which calls themselves socialist, has been denounced by the Turkish government as cyber-terrorists.

Cyber Security Institution

The newly founded Cyber Security Institution was preparing to fight domestic and international cyber attacks, an official from TÜBİTAK told the Daily News on Aug. 22, saying RedHack’s operations were “overrated.” “RedHack is here today, gone tomorrow. The RedHack team could be dispersed in a couple of months. Who knows? Are we going to end our work then? Of course not, we are designing our projects systematically now,” the official, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Daily News.

“We have existed since 1997. A bunch of inexperienced engineers cannot fight a group like us,” a RedHack member wrote in a message sent to the Daily News after the story including quotes from the TÜBİTAK official was published yesterday. “Those who have been appointed to the institution know us well, but they could not manage to blow our cover. There is no doubt that the anti-hackers they educate will not go far beyond hacking Facebook accounts or messenger programs.”

“We have many other documents to share,” he said. The RedHack Group revealed the identities of some foreign diplomatic personnel working in Turkey on July 3. The U.S. mission in Ankara condemned this action, and a prosecutor requested on July 6 that the group be listed as a terrorist organization. The group’s Twitter accounts were suspended immediately following this. RedHack went on to disclose the identities of police informants, after academics and journalists who supported the group were threatened on July 16.

A list of military personnel stationed at the Turkish military’s 2nd Commando Brigade was also exposed by the group on June 12. RedHack also hacked the websites of interior and justice ministries.