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Turkish Hackers Crack Electric Utility; Delete $670 Billion Of Pending Bills
RedHack - a Turkish hacker collective - has hacked the website of the Turkey Electricity Transmission Company, and, as TechWorm reports, claim to have deleted the pending bills of Turkish citizens amounting to Turkish Lira 1.5 trillion (a stunning $668.5 billion). The collective, which has many hacktivism projects against Turkey's internet censorship laws, posted a video of how they deleted the debt of millions of Turks.
RedHack the Turkey’s number one hacker collective today hacked into the website of the Turkey Electricity Transmission Company website.
They then did something which will cheer a lot of Turkish citizens who owe large amounts to the Electricity department.
They have claimed that they have deleted the pending bill of Turkish citizens amounting to Turkish Lira 1.5 trillion.
Türkiye Elektrik ?letim A.?. http://t.co/XfzvGAk0od taraf?m?zca hacklenmi?tir ?ifreler: http://t.co/j4vdW8wPQA Kapanmadan girin BORÇ silin:)
— RedHack_EN ? (@RedHack_EN) November 14, 2014
Redhack, are a Turkish hacker collective. They follow the Marxist–Leninist ideology and were founded in 1997. The RedHack has so far hacked several high profile Turkish websites like Council of Higher Education, Turkish police forces, the Turkish Army, Türk Telekom, and the National Intelligence Organization and many other websites.
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It has also put up a video about how it deleted the debt of millions of Turkish electricity distribution company customers.
The video is given below :
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Hahaha...
Rumor has it they used the money to buy bitcoins.
PS rollingjubilee.org
This is the solution to the national debt.
Tyler Durdin style !
I don't really know about that stuff...but wouldn't the company just be able to restore their records from back ups? I'm sure they have backups and don't just keep everything on a desktop hard drive like the IRS does with emails, right? ;-)
Oh, Fuck you Lois Lerner...you know that was funny.
In the digital age, I seriously doubt they have wiped out anything... Offsite backups, redundant systems, etc... Nice try though, it makes for a nice headline...
mnewn and pods: isn't that a Hassidic Jew on the home page link for this article?
What's up with that? You jews are everywhere!
The Robin Hood of Turkey!!! New heroes vs Erdogan! A dervish jubilee ...
We know that hackers will save mankind.
The question that really matters is did they also wipe the backups?
The presumption is that they HAVE backups...which may not be the case.
Marxists?
I think I'm in love!
They're over there, to the left of the shopping cart! :>D
Backups or no someone has a lot of work to do.
Erdogan's picture is there?
This
I am wondering about the amount...$650 Billion? That's more like Turkey's GDP. Something ain't right - even in lira, that's $4000 roughly for each man, woman and child
Yeah. Somebody likely miscounted a zero somewhere.
Maybe April Fool's came early... or it's still here? Sometimes the news makes me think we're in one of those temporal infinite do loops and it keeps being April 1.
I can believe that. Once I had to change my plan at Istanbul airport so i took a cab from terminal 1 to terminal 3 and cab charged me $225,000.
They can still take the meter reading again and charge you for the entire amount from the last reading they have left which will most likely be a huge amount. If you don't have the latest bill payment on paper, well sucks to be you. I hope you printed out your e-payment slip.
Turkey has about 75 million people, including kids and babys. And those 75 million people have pending bills of about 700 billion dollars? Hard to believe.
Erdogan's palace probably needs 20x the energy of Al Gore's palace in TN
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30061107
1,000 room palace
Erdogan ordered the hit himself. The guy is dope. He will end like Louis XVI
Hol-ee-crap.
This doesn't say "let them eat brioche", this says "let them eat shit". Nice link btw.
Wow.
"The project has also been lambasted by the political opposition, which pointed out that the monthly electricity bill alone - likely to be footed by the taxpayer - will reach £200,000 ($313,000)."
What does "likely to be footed by the taxpayer" mean exactly? Who else would be paying it, him personally?
Am I misreading or misunderstanding something?
$670 billion divided by the population of Turkey of 75 million works out to $9,054 per person.
I had a late night and an early rise but something does not seem right.
$670 Billion divided by the 20 million households in Turkey = $33,500.
Hotels, restaurants, ports, hospitals, factories etc...
Everyone is a winner!!!!
Sounds like nobody has paid their bill for 5 or 10 years.
Detroit East !!!
Since they have done it in Turkey they should be able to do the same thing in other countries.....
Security can be a lock or a weld, locks can be picked.
Detroit water bills?
Fucking Awesome !!!
And when the lights go out that will be even better.
“He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of (Istanbul) go out, we would know that our job was done.”
Fuck it. They should invest in renewables.
Now how about they do in every jurisdiction that has implemented "Smart fucking stupid meters?" The theft that keeps on destroying.
Next meter reading the bills will be 100% accurate and all bills will be paid or the power gets shut off. This is a non event.
Yeah right... 80% of GDP in outstanding power bills.
And so Project Mayhem Begins..........
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAQzVrfFyWk
Honestly I kind of have to call bullshit on this. It wouldn't be that easy, sure there are vulnerabilities in websites and exploits but this is borderline retarded. They are running no script on tor browser and just waltz right into a turkish government website and delete all the electric bills for everyone that owes anything.
Uh huh, those files would be on a closed circuit or atleast backed up, soooooo, project mayhem type shit but still, I don't buy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAQzVrfFyWk
That number can't be right.
Meanwhile elsewhere in the world, debt-owners release a shocked gasp as their balls collectively shrink in fear.
Doubt this would happen anywhere that counts though.
Colateralized mortgage debt obligations?
Maybe. Although $670 billion is chump change in the grander scheme. Also, I would be pretty surprised if someone didn't have some kind of backup on cold storage.
Never know though. This story reminds me of that guy who torched student loan records in S. America.
I call Bullshit!
There's NO way that the "Pending Electric Bills" are 670 BILLION.
Doesn't anybody do Sanity Checks anymore?
Electricity is apparently very expensive in Turkey. All those Christmas Tree lights gonna use lots of wattage.
No Christmas in Turkey.
Ramadan is fasting during the day and eating at nights. They live basically for the night when they should be sleeping. Could be the reason for the power consumption.
Does Turkey have aluminum smelters???
Do Turkeys vote for Christmas?
Givin the choice of Thanksiving or Christmas, I think we all know where Turkeys place their vote...
The exchange rate calculation does check out. The question is whether the group claiming to have carried this out is actually being truthful.
Also- if true and the debts are written off, watch the govt. turn around and bill the taxpayers for it.
Oops, sorry. Decimal point error.
They meant $670.
The scam lies in the figure itself, if "authorities" are proclaiming this amount.
Turks are world class hagglers, smugglers and law benders. And their stock market rises and falls faster than European stock markets. You can make or lose a fortune there really fast, if you get my meaning.
That does make sense. Claim it was more than it was to either hide theft or to steal from the insurance company. They do have insurance right?
To put this number in perspective- this is about $8772 per Turkish citizen. Which is over twice the US student loan debt per capita. That is at 3761 per US citizen.
So yeah, not inconceivable. But yes, unlikely. (Good catch.)
Perhaps that includes residential, commercial, and possibly international customers? I have no idea but maybe they sell power to Iran or something.
If this is the case then maybe Greece. They are extremely dependent on foreign energy. Iran has their own reserves, though extraction is a problem.
From a geopolitical standpoint, Greece would make more sense too, since Turkey was flirting with the EU. Iran has been something of a pariah.
I could see Western Europe and the US bullying/courting Turkey into tossing the Greeks a line of credit on their power supply.
(Don't forget that the war in Syria is largely about removing a key strategic ally to Russia, and running energy pipelines through Syria, Turkey and Greece from the Middle East and North Africa in order to break Russia's energy monopoly on the EU.)
Agreed. The GDP of Turkey is only twice that.
With a population of roughly 75 million that bill comes to about $9000 per man, woman, and child. Or, $36,000 per family of four. Quite an electric bill...
Coming to a bank account near you...
And the bank says, sorry but there is nothing we can do to get your money back as they are handing out bonuses to top management.
They follow the Marxist–Leninist ideology
I wonder how they feel about student loans;)
For once lenin has fathered a breed of true anti-statists.
I'm sure Bakunin is delighted.
Hacking your way to a debt jubilee. We need to do that for student debt in the land of the free.
Please hack xcel energy next!
Hopefully the Turkey Electricity Transmission Company Enron's.
Unless the 'Hackers' compromised their backups for a long period of time, this will be a 'fail'. They'll just do a restore after cominig back online, with minimal loss to their billing. If the backups were compromised, there could be a problem, but it would be very sloppy on the company's part if such a thing were even possible.
Still awesome!
An American, not US subject.
It's Turkey not Germany
Saving files is always a shit, big shit.
My experience comes from those discs and tapes in the 1980s and I can say from experience that shit continues just the same with all aggregate technology.
Never, I repeat NEVER a back-up will be the same as the original!
The memory of great organizations that work day to day there is no way to save.
You can make a back up hourly, weekly, monthly etcetera, but also have to have an insane storage capacity.
The aggregate is correct.
You aggregates information and even then, it appears that some intern doing shit where it should not because it saves the information and overwrites files.
Sometimes a boss or user has a vague memory and wants something from decades ago, this is the worst case ....
When a court order is the easiest thing is just to say that "we have no back-up."
Where I work there is what one sees in the movies "Hollyood".
hehe.
yes, but NSA might have the info anyway
when court asks, they give you the courtesy to come clean before they bring in the NSA goons to show you what they already know...
you may not have the back-up but they do!
I think they may have some recorded stuff when I had a phone in São Paulo at the time that Regan was in Rio de Janeiro, was one of the first to acquire Motorola.
That shit had a battery that lasted only six hours!
It was as heavy as a loaded revolver 32! Kkkkkk!
After that the technology has evolved, you can even link a device to a CPF (Registration of Income Tax).
In my case, I am Brazilian.
Honestly I'm not afraid to comment here, my IP is dynamic, I control the MAC address of my network cards, traveling from North to South in my country that is vast as a continent.
I have no cell phone or Apple counterpart.
I use a lot on my Linux Operating System service.
I spoke too agree?
:-)
You'd therefore have to be hacking the backups for a long time first. Doubtful that happens.
Given human nature, Turkish culture and corporate kleptocracy these days, it seems far more likely that some key insiders are simply waving the "Hackers" flag as a cover story for Insider Embezzlement. And... it's gone!
Debt Jubilee of another kind, bitchezzz.
In a free society and economy, what they did would be a crime.
In a fascist bankster-state like the one in Turkey, where the elites try to own and control the masses, what they did is awesome!
An American, not US subject.
"To understand the true state of things in the fascist bankster-state west, try to picture debt and fiat as a plow."
Let them hack into the Fed's computer and get rid of the $4+ Trilllllll. Come to think of it the $18 Trillll .GOV. Whole Hog you say, $SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS Derivative UNFUNDED liabilities lurking out yonder.
Dont have to wait for them to delete it to stop paying it.
Uhuh!
Delete the debt Fed will take six days with a paperweight on the button "Del"!
Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!
Those are backed up every second to Tel Aviv.
Buy an ASIMO robot and crack the code. After gofund raising cash for an army of ASIMOs and turn them into suicide robots.
Offer to deactivate them for $1,000,000,000,000!!!!
I liked this guy!
Hopefully he has used Shift + Del!
hehe!
We are Anonymous. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.
TEAM NATO FukYa...
The utility will have backups of the info on hard drives.
Well in most cases when asked if there is a backup, the response is: "Ah..............................."
No shit. Been there, heard THAT before.
I'd bet there isn't one in a thousand, no, TEN thousand, posters here that have a current backup of their home computer.
I backed up over 1.2TB just a couple of weeks ago. These are the way to go:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/toshiba-canvio-connect-2tb-external-usb-3-0-...
Without the cash-flow from those accounts, I wonder how the utility will buy fuel to keep generating electricity? Just wondering.
Atatürk Dam
Hydro energy, no input cost
Cash machine forever
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atat%C3%BCrk_Dam
Cost at the time to build it was 1.25 billion
"Go home Yankee!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3c1KQ3E4zs
I just can't get this article out of my head?
Special Report - Golden Loophole: How an alleged Turkish crime ring helped Iran | Reuters
How ironic that such a geographically important spit of land is full of turks.
how can you people sit on computers all day and not know about what kind of backups are done these days.
everything is backed up all the time at worst they might lose a few hours of new records created, this story smells of exageration and bs
Hey Anonymous, have an Amex bill pending. Any way you can delete it? Amex' CEO is already one of best paid CEO's anyways.
Don't stop.
Who knew utility bills made up 82% of Turkey's GDP? Must be colder than Canada there!
The same guys that recently predicted a nuclear event in Chicago in 2015?
Great infomercial for Carbonite
the should have sent the bill to the central fed bank in turkey... i hear those fucks are made of money
Redhack great job! Please come to the US and do your magic. Start with credit card accounts. Then move on to mortgage accounts. And utility billls would be much appreciated.
You are heroes!
It would be mucho appreciado if they include the IRS mainframes in their efforts (but you'll have to learn COBOL [most likely!])
Hack everything! Burn, baby, burn.
Turkish...probably one of the best adjectives ever made
"Well Jimmy, do you like Gladiator movies?"
Since the power generation plants were paid by taxes , they supposedly belong to the People .
The ownership was hijacked .
What you see now is an attempt to rectify the situation .
This is happening all over .
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2011/10/ostrum-game.html
or
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com/2014/05/nova-luddites.html
it's happenning!!!
If the utility provider runs automatically a backup at least once a week and incremental backup every day, then it was a useless effort.
Something is BS with this claim of $668.5 billion of debt. as this works out to a debt of $8356.25 for every person for the 80 million population of Turkey. 668,500,000,000 / 80,000,000 = 8356.25
I'm calling bullshit.