TURKISH HACKERS ATTACKED ON ICELAND AND INDIA (10th June 2019)

INCIDENT DESCRIPTION:

This cyber security breach news is exciting and interesting for obviously all of us but specially for the football lovers too. The incident is related to the two teams Turkey and Iceland. On 8^th of June, Turkey defeated world cup champion France from 2-0 and took a flight of 6.5 hours long overnight for Iceland for another qualifying match of UEFA Euro 2020. It all started from Keflavík International Airport, when team arrived there. Actually, two incidents happened that apparently disturbed the Turkish players badly. 

First one was sort of racist jeering at Turkish players when a man approached players and used a dish-scouring brush as a microphone and tried mimicking the players jokingly. 

Second was a matter of total disrespect for the whole team, who claimed that they were kept waiting for 3 hours for searching their luggage at passport control by the police. Turkish diplomatic sources claimed the official request for fast track security check was already made on 16^th May, they also reminded Iceland authorities again on 6^th June after some alternation in request for fast track security check. While ministry from Iceland claimed that the request was received just few hours before team’s arrival at airport. This incident was strongly condemned by Turkey’s president Tayyib Erdogan and foreign minister of Turkey. A diplomatic note, from Embassy of Turkey in Oslo, also sent to government of Iceland to record protest against disrespect shown to team. Meantime, Turkish people in social media burst and demanded for finding root cause and the culprit behind mimicking at airport.

Hackers Response and Analysis:

In response to this disrespect of team, the Turkish hacker group ‘Anka Neferler Tim’ attacked below on Iceland’s websites:

1)      Isavia websites (operates Keflavík International Airport)

2)      Icelandic football association ksi.is

3)      News website sunnlenska.is

4)      South Iceland general interest

Hackers shut down several Icelandic websites using DDoS attack. The attackers simply crashed sites by sending overwhelming traffic from different networks and choked the network bandwidth. This attack targets the availability of resources for legitimate users as they cannot access after the attack. The Isavia website later posted note and explained about DDoS attack caused website unavailable and their engineers recovered it. Extra Bandwidth must be available to avoid such incidents.

Another Turkish group ‘Ayyildiz Tim’ hacked verified twitter account of Indian actor who has over 37.4 million followers. This group then defaced the profile picture of celebrity with PM of Pakistan Mr. Imran Khan’s picture and posted several tweets but in one tweet they condemned irrespective behavior of Iceland with Turkish footballers.

Password of actor would be leaked ago and people use often same password for multiple accounts. Password must be different for accounts and also enable 2 factors authentication. Later, account recovered shortly and their cyber unit announced that they are investigating this incident.

Conclusion:

This was a game and it could be any other incident.
But the response can be in result of cyber attack.

“WORLD IS IN THE MIDST OF A CYBER WAR”As per research conducted by Venafi