Hacker (illustrative)
Hacker (illustrative)Flash 90

The Russian embassy in Tel Aviv was hacked on Sunday. Reports are claiming that Turkish hackers broke through firewalls and shut down the website of the embassy.

The hack took a few hours for embassy workers to overcome and to get the site up and running again.

According to the Russian news agency Tass, people who visited the Russian embassy’s site during the period of the attack were “redirected to a page containing texts in the Turkish language and respective symbols.”

During the incident, Russian embassy’s spokesman Yevgeny Piskupov told Tass that "the website is not working. The causes are being probed into. Efforts are being taken jointly with the Israeli provider to resume the website’s operation."

A Turkish group that goes by the name of Bortecine Siber Tim claimed responsibility for the attack. The same group had previously broken into a social network page of the Russian Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov.

The Russian website has been broken into twice before in recent years, once in March 2012, when it was attacked by the so-called TheHackersArmy, and prior to that in April of 2010.

The hack comes as tensions between Russia and Turkey continue to escalate and those between Israel and Turkey apparently are heading towards a calm. The choice to hack the Russian embassy in Israel may not have been a coincidence.