Anonymous claims major leak of Turkish police data

An Anonymous-linked hacker has allegedly leaked the sensitive contents of the Turkish national police database.

The dump is part of the anarchist hacking collective’s larger digital campaign against the Turkish government, which the group has accused of supporting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Turkey has strongly denied any support, direct or indirect.

{mosads}Late on Monday, Anonymous-affiliated Twitter accounts started sending out information about the data dump using the hashtag #OpTurkey, short for “Operation Turkey.”

A video posted to a YouTube account claiming to represent Anonymous explained the reasoning behind the leak.

“In light of various government abuses in the past few months, which have been conducted by the Turkish regime, we took the liberty to dump a huge database belonging to Turkey’s general directorate of security in response to these various abuses,” said the digital voice typical of Anonymous videos.

According to a post accompanying the data dump, the information has been collected from the Turkish police’s database over the past two years. The full, uncompressed file is a hefty 17.8 gigabytes.

“Turkey, you have been accused of aiding and buying oil from the Daesh terrorist group,” the video said, using an alternate name for ISIS frequently used by Europeans.

“You have also been accused of being a safe passage for the group’s recruitment in Syria,” the video added. “Adding to it, your ludicrous record on human rights.”

The Turkish government has not confirmed whether the data is authentic.

If the data is real, it would be the second major Anonymous assault on the Turkish government in recent months. In December, the group took responsibility for a slew of cyberattacks on Turkey’s Internet that took down hundreds of thousands of the country’s websites.

The onslaught got so bad that the Turkish government eventually had to cut off all foreign Internet traffic coming to “.tr” websites, the domain for Turkey.

When taking credit for the attacks, Anonymous cited many of the same reasons as did the video announcing the Turkish police data leak.

“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 video posted at the time to an Anonymous YouTube channel.

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.