Turkey's new cybersecurity center to open Monday

Turkey's cybersecurity authority National Computer Emergency Response Center (USOM) plans to inaugurate its security and response center on Monday.

Situated in the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) in Ankara, the center will be staffed with intelligence officers and white hat hackers – hackers who use their expertise to find and fix security vulnerabilities instead of exploiting it.

The center will also employ police and gendarmerie officers to establish easy coordination between different branches of law enforcement.

Authorities said the security center will use locally developed software to respond to cyber-threats immediately. Turkey has increasingly become a target of cyberattacks from around the world in the past years.

The inauguration ceremony will be attended by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Turkey has been making significant strides in cybersecurity after being targeted by major attacks. In October, a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Türk Telekom, the country's largest service provider, disrupted internet access across the country.

Several other cyberattacks have occurred in Turkey in the last decade. The international hacker collective Anonymous posed a constant threat for several years, targeting Turkey in 2011 and 2012. In the wake of both threats, the group launched an attack targeting Turkey's internet watchdog – the Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication, also known as the TİB – which eventually failed due to measures taken beforehand.