Turkey will establish a “cyber army” against possible cyber threats, Turkish Transportation, Maritime Affairs and Communications Minister Ahmet Arslan said, commenting on the recent WannaCry “ransomware” attack that has infected more than 300,000 computers worldwide.
Arslan also said the cyberattack had not harmed Turkey thanks to a warning sent to all institutions and organizations to keep main databases closed as the hackers were seeking ransom payments for the data that they encrypted.
“However, they may pose a bigger threat and danger in the following days. That’s why we are strengthening the structure all the time. Some 13,000 white hackers came to work in the public sector. We are building a cyber army with five groups,” Arslan told the Hürriyet daily, adding that there had been a major intensification in cyberattacks since June 2016.
“We survived these recent attacks unharmed as a country,” he said, noting that only a factory in the northwestern province of Bursa stopped producing for a day due to the cyberattack on the Renault center in France.
