Dozens Tied to Anonymous Arrested in Turkey

Turkish authorities have arrested 32 individuals believed to be linked to the distributed denial of service attacks against government websites that were recently launched by Anonymous.

Last week, members of the notorious hacktivist group protested against the Turkish government's plan to enact country-wide Internet filters by attacking the websites of the country's telecom regulator, the prime minister and the parliament.

According to SecurityWeek, police raided numerous residences in a dozen cities and arrested the 32 individuals who are suspected of being Anonymous members.

The law enforcement action comes after last week Spanish authorities arrested three alleged leaders of the Anonymous branch in Spain.

They are accused of orchestrating attacks against Sony's European PlayStation Store, several local banks, as well as websites belonging to the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia and New Zealand.

Following the arrests in Spain Anonymous reiterated that it is a movement, not an organization, and that it has no leaders.

Furthermore, the group claims that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are the online equivalent of real world forms of protest like sit-ins, in which protesters block access to a building.

The analogy is not far-fetched, giving that Anonymous' main DDoS tool is a program that does nothing more than make regular HTTP requests to the targeted websites.

However, since websites are normally set up based on an average load estimation, many can't cope with thousands of people querying them at the same time.

On the other hand, some more shady Anonymous members have access to botnets and are known to have used them in order to increase the effectiveness of the group's attacks.

Regardless of whether Anonymous members are right to compare DDoS with sit-ins or not, such attacks are illegal in many countries, so the participants are breaking the law.