They threaten to start again "if France continues to support the terrorists". The Turks behind the hacking of the Twitter accounts of the editor in chief of Paris Match, Bruno Jeudy, on Monday, and of the ex-presidential candidate François Fillon, on Tuesday, obviously have no intention of stop there. Questioned by Le Parisien before the suspension of their account by Twitter at the beginning of the afternoon, members of the tiny group "Ayyıldız Tim" even warned their future targets: "We will hack all the most popular accounts. "
Who is affected? Hard to say. Their real targets, described by them as "terrorists", are the Kurdish political entities of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) and the YPG (Units for the Protection of the Kurdish People), long opposed to Ankara. This Tuesday morning, the pirates of Ayyıldız Tim, won over to the cause of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, did not hesitate to put their anti-Kurdish claims on the account of the former French Prime Minister.
"Confidential data has been recovered"
Shortly before 9 am, between Turkish flags and group logos, one could read on his account: "I support the operations of the Peace Fountain" (an operation carried out by Turkey at the end of 2019 against the Kurdish forces in Syria), "I condemn the attacks against the Turks in France", or "The French public should know that the PKK is a terrorist group".
The entourage of François Fillon assures the Parisian to have regained control of his Twitter account very quickly and to monitor him closely since. Too late ? "All of his accounts have been hacked, not just Twitter. Confidential data has been recovered, ”claim the Turkish pirates, without this information being confirmed by the entourage of the former candidate.
The day before, it was the account of journalist Bruno Jeudy who posted similar messages and paid the price for this de-icing technique, which consists in taking advantage of a security vulnerability to register, on a site or an account of social networks, claim messages, taking advantage of a certain visibility. François Fillon has nearly 620,000 subscribers, Bruno Jeudy 440,000.
Bruno Jeudy's Twitter account was hacked by Turkish hackers.
The question I ask myself is why him in particular? pic.twitter.com/agB3yMru4u
Paris supports Kurdish fighters in Syria
Why go after these two men in particular, who have not, in any case recently, expressed themselves on the Kurdish cause? The pirates did not wish to specify it, but they assure that the Hexagon is today in the sight of Ayyıldız Tim because of its “anti-Turkish rhetoric”. And its members insist: "While the whole world considers the PKK and the YPG as terrorist organizations, France is on the side of these terrorists. An inaccurate statement.
As for the PKK, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and President Macron both used the term "terrorists", as Liberation recalled in an article in Check News in 2018. With regard to the YPG, their position is different since the French government supports the Kurdish fighters who were the spearhead of the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group in the Iraqo-Syrian zone. But France is far from being the only one, among the Western States, to have dubbed them. At the beginning of December, the French president had hit the nail on the head by declaring that he saw no possible consensus with Ankara, which demands the classification of the Kurds of the YPG as a terrorist group.
If the fight against the PKK is this time at the center of their action, the fight of the hackers of Ayyıldız Tim in fact embraces many nationalist causes. On its website, the group, which has so far never been worried by the Turkish authorities, says it wants to fight against "the lack of respect for the institutions of our country, our statesmen and our spiritual values" .
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"We have been established all over the world since 2002", assure its members, who explain that they are one of the multiple and heterogeneous entities of the "Turkish cyber-army", movement of hackers who share the same ambitions, sometimes extended to Islamist beliefs.
"Nationalist and patriotic convictions"
Without knowing whether it is this branch, members of the “Turkish cyber-army” were responsible, in 2011, for hacking the Internet page of the media Charlie Hebdo, during its renamed number "Sharia Hebdo", while threatening the Liberation newspaper with a similar fate.
Also in 2011, the websites of several deputies, including LR Valérie Boyer, had also been targeted by Turkish pirates, when the law sanctioning the negation of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was voted. To date , Recep Tayyip Erdogan still refuses to use the term "genocide".
When asked to describe their small group, members of Ayyıldız Tim refer us to their Wikipedia page - of which they are probably the authors - which depicts them as "Turkish soldiers" who "protect themselves from future threats" by carrying out hacking actions linked to their “nationalist and patriotic convictions”.
Official Israeli, Chinese, Danish, Serbian websites…
They gargle, for example, for having hacked the site of the United States Department of Defense, and claim attacks against official Israeli, Chinese, Danish, Serbian, Dutch sites… Media, including the Twitter account of the news agency Associated Press, and Syrian news agencies were also found in their sight. 01.net recalls that in 2018 Ayyıldız Tim also attacked the Twitter accounts of two editorial writers from the American channel Fox News.
What is the ambition of these hackers this time? At the end of the morning, on his Twitter account - then not yet suspended -, Ayyıldız Tim made himself very mysterious about his future actions: “What you have seen so far was only the trailer. The film begins now ”. A simple threat?