Turkey faces cyber-attacks from 12 countries

Turkey faced a huge cyber-attack over the last few days from 12 European and Asian countries, Turkish government officials said on Tuesday, May 14.

The hackers targeted the Turkish public institutions' websites and their official mail addresses. The attacks, especially targeted the websites and e-mail addresses with a .gov extension and changed their IP addresses, in order to hide their locations.

At first appearance, all the attacks seemed to come from South Korea, but it was unveiled later that the attackers used proxy IP addresses to hide their countries of origin. As a result of the attacks, that was continued for three days and targeted mainly e-mail addresses with a .gov extension, all e-mails of public offices were sent to spam folders.

The government offices and private companies strengthened their security measures, as the attacks were stopped last evening.

According to Norse, an Atlanta-based global leader in real-time attack intelligence, Turkey is one of the leading attacking countries along with China, the U.S. and Netherlands. On the other hand, the United States, Philippines and Russia are at the top of the target country lists.