Tag Archives: syria

Network Solutions seizes over 700 domains registered to Syrians

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While Syria’s Internet connection is back up, many of the sites hosted in Damascus have lost their domain names. As Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security reports, the domain registrar Network Solutions LLC has taken control of 708 domain names in the .com, .org, and .net top-level domains registered to Syrian organizations. The organizations affected by the seizure include the state-supported hacker group Syrian Electronic Army.

Usually when there’s a domain name seizure, it’s the work of government agencies like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or the FBI, or domains are shut down with the help of US Marshals as part of a court-sanctioned seizure related to malware. But in this case, Network Solutions appears to have seized the domains in question without coordinating with federal authorities, though its action was guided by federal regulations—domain name registration is one of the services explicitly banned in US trade sanctions enacted against Syria last year. Network Solutions has marked the seized domains with the notation “OFAC Holding,” indicating they were taken over in accordance with regulations propagated by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, a unit of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

The vast majority of the seized domains were pointed at IP addresses assigned to the Syrian Computer Society. As we’ve reported previously, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was an Army doctor and ophthalmologist before being groomed to take over for his father, was head of the Syrian Computer Society in the 1990s. He became president in 2000. The Syrian Computer Society acts as Syria’s domain registration authority and regulates the Internet within Syria, and is also believed to be connected to Syria’s state security apparatus. The Syrian Computer Society registered .sy domain names for the Syrian Electronic Army’s servers, giving the hacker group a national-level domain name (sea.sy) rather than a .com or other non-government address, signifying its status as at least a state-supervised operation.

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Syria drops offline, again

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At about 2:45 Eastern time (18:45 UTC), Internet traffic in and out of Syria came to a sudden stop, as routers stopped propagating routes to the country’s block of Internet Protocol addresses. The suddenness and completeness of the disconnection is indicative of another government-directed shutdown—the first since a two-day outage last November.

All but three entries in Border Gateway Protocol routing tables “were definitely just dropped,” said Dan Hubbard, CTO of Umbrella Security Labs, the research branch of security firm OpenDNS in a phone interview with Ars Technica. “There was no degradation or packet loss beforehand. It was either a government action or a full cable cut (of Syria’s three outbound connections).”

The last time Syria disappeared from the Internet was on November 29, 2012. But unlike the last outage, today’s wasn’t preceded by smaller interruptions in network traffic. Since December 1, when Syria’s Internet was restored from the first shutdown, “there hasn’t been anything notable going on with [Syria's] traffic,” Hubbard said.

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Paint it black: How Syria methodically erased itself from the ‘Net

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Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s regime has cut the country’s connection to the Internet, and has shut down much of the country’s other telecommunications infrastructure as fighting continues near Damascus.
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Just after noon Damascus time on Thursday, the government-owned Syrian Telecommunications Establishment essentially deleted the whole country from the Internet’s routing tables, blocking all inbound and outbound network traffic. Rather than the result of terrorist attacks, as the government claimed on state television, the blackout was a well-rehearsed and deliberate act intended to deny connection to Syria’s citizens and the opposition forces currently trying to topple the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad.

Five Syrian networks, identified by their IP address prefixes, were reachable over the network connections of Indian telecom provider Tata Communications until late Thursday. The Syrian government’s previous network monitoring company, BGPMon, reported that the country was 100 percent offline by 1:45 AM Damascus time Friday morning, until 4:30 PM on December 1 when connections were restored. There were also reports of widespread landline and cellular phone service outages.

That didn’t mean that there was no way for Syrian citizens to connect to the outside world. And the US State Department provided communications equipment to “dozens” of local councils in areas of Syria no longer under government control in order to bypass Syria’s government-controlled networks.

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Feature: Game over—how sanctions and violence doomed Syria’s gaming industry

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“Life for Syrian game developers has never been better,” joked Falafel Games founder Radwan Kasmiya in an e-mail to Ars Technica. “You can test the action on the streets and get back to your desktop to script it on your keyboard.”

Kasmiya’s icy humor hides a sobering truth about the troubles faced by Syria’s once-promising game development industry. The country once looked like a future technology hub, with its centralized location among the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries allowing it to easily draw programming and engineering talent from Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. But that promise has been effectively squashed, first by global economic sanctions and then by more than a year of bloody civil conflict.

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Thousands of e-mails lifted from Syrian dictator Assad’s personal account

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Syrian revolutionaries obtained thousands of e-mails from the personal accounts of embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his wife. The e-mails show a cavalier attitude toward the unrest in the country, which has resulted in the deaths of about 8,000 people over the past year due to brutal government crackdowns on civilians protesting Assad’s rule.

The Guardian obtained more than 3,000 documents that activists claim to be the private e-mails of ruling couple Bashar and Asma al-Assad, sam@alshahba.com and ak@alshahba.com. The activists obtained access to the presidential couple’s accounts in June 2011 after a mole, allegedly with links to the inner circle of the Syrian government, provided opposition group “Supreme Council of the Revolution” with the usernames and passwords for each. Activists claimed that they used the information to stay a step ahead of regime moves in Damascus.

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Anonymous exposes e-mails of Syrian presidential aides

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Hackers aligned with Anonymous have exposed hundreds of e-mail messages from the webmail server of Syria’s Ministry of Presidential Affairs, the support ministry for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Among the exposed e-mail messages was a set of talking points for Assad’s interview with Barbara Walters in December 2011.

A translation of the e-mail sent by Sheherazad Jaafari, a press attaché at the Syrian mission to the United Nations, to Assad aide and former Al Jazeera journalist Luna Chebel, provided helpful hints for Assad to manipulate American opinion about what was going on in Syria. The message suggested that “it is hugely important and worth mentioning that ‘mistakes’ have been done in the begining of the crises because we did not have a well-organized ‘police force.’ American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear there are ‘mistakes’ done and now we are ‘fixing it.’” 

Jaafari suggested comparing what was happening in Syria to US law enforcement’s response to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Along with the release of these e-mails, Anonymous also exposed the passwords of 78 accounts on the Ministry’s servers. Of the passwords revealed, 31 were “12345″ and a number were minor variations on that. Some of the other passwords in the set included:

  • iloveyou
  • 123vivasyria
  • system
  • honda2011
  • testing

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Pro-government hactivists deface Al Jazeera coverage of Syrian violence

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The Al Jazeera English website was attacked and defaced on January 29 by hackers supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Targeting the news organization’s “Syria Live Blog,” which has been providing ongoing coverage of the Arab League’s observer mission to Syria and developments in the ongoing unrest in the country, the hacker group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army posted pro-Assad and pro-Syrian government images to the site.

The relationship of the Syrian Electronic Army to the government itself is unclear. However, the group’s domain was registered in May of 2011 in Tartous, Syria, and its site is hosted on servers maintained by the Syrian Computer Society—a group Assad was the head of before assuming Syria’s presidency, and introduced the Internet to Syria in 2001.

The attack started at about 2:30 PM Central Time, just after Al Jazeera posted a report on casualties reported by the Local Coordinating Committees, an activist network in Syria. On their own site, the Syrian Electronic Army announced the “code re-penetration” of the site by a “professional Syrian battalion” of hackers, denouncing Al Jazeera for broadcasting “false and fabricated news” to “ignite sedition” among the people of Syria and achieve the goals of “Washington and Tel Aviv.”

This is the second attack against Al Jazeera this month claimed by the pro-Assad hacktivist group. In September, the group attacked Harvard University’s site, and keeps a graphic from Harvard’s site on its homepage as a trophy of that exploit. In August, the group attacked the Tumblr site set up by YourAnonNews in response to Anonymous’ attacks on Syrian government sites.

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