Internet Access Shut Down In Most of Syria

According to Renesys, a service that focuses on monitoring Internet connectivity, due to the civil unrest that is going on in Syria, most of the country’s Internet services have been shut down.

According to a blog post that was posted by Renesys on Friday, June 3 at approximately 6:35 a.m. local time, close to two-thirds of the entire country’s networks were disabled. The company said that “over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table."

Unfortunately for Syrians, most of their Internet access is brought to them by a company called SyriaTel, which is state-owned. "They buy most of their Internet transit from Turk Telekom and Deutsche Telekom, with some contribution from PCCW, Tata, and Telecom Italia," Renesys said. "Connectivity has historically come in over submarine cable from Cyprus; activation of new terrestrial fiber connections to Turkey have been delayed by this year's political unrest."

Well, what about the other third of the networks, some might ask? Unfortunately, Renesys said that all of those connections belong to the Syrian government. Of course the country’s Oil Ministry Web site is still online, as is Syrian Telecom’s official page, but government sites like the Ministry of Education, the Damascus city government page and the Syrian Customs site are all down.

Although Renesys had lots of great information, they did not have any evidence of what specific regions or cities were affected by the outages or how the massive outage was coordinated; however, they did say that "if Egypt and Libya's Internet outages are any guide, one might conclude that events on the streets in Syria are reaching a tipping point."

Google confirmed the outages in Syria via its Twitter account, tweeting on Friday afternoon: "Google services currently blocked in Syria."

For months the citizens of Syria of have been protesting against the conditions of their country, but according the Washington Post, the real turning point for everything was this past Wednesday. The Post reports that more than 300 opponents of the current Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, held a meeting at a hotel in Turkey to discuss what their next move should be. According to the Post, "It was significant that the government's opponents were finally coming together to try to present a united front to a world that remains skeptical about the Syrian protest movement."

Just this past February, there were reports that the Syrian government was planning to lift the then current bans on YouTube and Facebook. These bans had been present for over four years and were supposed to be lifted due to the “popular upheaval” about the situation.

In the past year, there has been plenty of civil unrest around the globe. Protest and violence exploded in the Middle East in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. In January Internet services went down in Egypt for a couple days, due to the protests concerning the country’s governmental issues, including the nearly 30-year rule of its “President” Hosni Mubarak. In March Internet services were also disabled in Libya due to similar issues and protests.

The outages in Syria, however, ironically occurred on the same day that the United Nations released its Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. Frank La Rue’s report discussed the recent increase of governmental restriction on the flow of online information. He noted that this was mostly due to the Internet’s ability to unite individuals together in protest of something; however, in his report he encouraged governments to not restrict their country’s citizens' Web usage. He instead asked them to work on developing a plan that would make the Internet widely available, accessible and affordable to all.

"There should be as little restriction as possible to the flow of information via the Internet, except in a few, very exceptional, and limited circumstances prescribed by international human rights law," La Rue said in a statement.

"The report by the Special Rapporteur raises concerns about justifying broad surveillance powers under the name of national security or counter-terrorism," said the U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation in a statement. "La Rue should be commended for questioning the ostensible motives for online surveillance."

"As Rapporteur La Rue affirms, the Internet's unique ability to provide ample space for individual free expression can lead to the strengthening of other human rights, including political, economic and social rights," said Cynthia Wong, the Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Global Internet Freedom. "In order for these rights to be realized, governments, civil society and industry must all continue to build on the work begun by the Special Rapporteur."

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Malware on the Rise

Malware is the thing to look out for these days. McAfee claims that they tracked more than six million different unique malware samples in the first quarter alone. Those numbers make the first quarter the most active quarter for malware issues ever.

In a statement, Vincent Weafer, the senior vice president of McAfee Labs, said, "It's been a busy start to 2011 for cybercriminals."

McAfee went on to say that February was the most active malware month. In February, 2011 there were 2.75 million samples alone. According to the company, in March, 2011 there were also more than 350,000 fake anti-virus software samples, which was the highest level in over a year; however, partially in part to the demise of the Rustock botnet, spam is at the lowest level since 2007.

"Even though this past quarter once again showed that spam has slowed, it doesn't mean that cybercriminals aren't actively pursuing alternate avenues," Weafer continued. "We're seeing a lot of emerging threats, such as Android malware and new botnets attempting to take over where Rustock left off, that will have a significant impact on the activity we see quarter after quarter."

The most popular OS for mobile malware is still Symbian, but McAfee reported that Android is gaining on Symbian and came in at number two. McAfee thinks that Android isn’t number one because Google allows for the side-loading of Android apps. This means that it does not have a main spot where it checks apps for any possible suspicious behavior.

Just this past week, Google had to remove more than two dozen apps from their Android Market due to malware issues. NetQuin, a mobile security firm, also identified more than 20 malware filled Android apps that went to the extent of auto-dialing phones to pile up high user fees.

When dealing with spam, McAfee tracked more than 1.5 trillion messages each and every day, but thankfully that number is less than half of what it was just a year ago.

Government agencies across the globe have been working hard to crack down on cybercrime. In September dozens of international cyber-gangsters who were responsible for the creation and spread of the Zeus botnet were arrested. Also, thanks to Microsoft, FireEye (an anti-malware company), the University of Washington and Pfizer (a pharmaceutical firm) Rustock was taken down in March.

In their statement McAfee warned that the creators of the Zeus bot are hard at work merging the Zeus code with the SpyEye botnet. This would affect banking and online transactions, so it could cause some major issues if it isn’t handled.

"There was a strong uptick in new botnet infections toward the end of Q1, most likely due to the reseeding process, where cybercriminals slow down activity in order to spend time rebuilding botnets," McAfee said. "The botnet takedowns have resulted in an increase in the price of sending spam on the underground marketplace, showing that the laws of supply and demand also apply to cybercrime."

So why are people even falling for these threats? Well, cyber-criminals are very sophisticated these days. They make their scams look legit, so it’s hard to tell that it’s a threat sometimes until it’s too late. It seems that the spam that is promoting an actual product seemed to lure in the most people. IGNORE the e-mails advertising iPads and HDTVs. McAfee also noted a rise in “banker” Trojans. They lure people in talking about things like UPS, FedEx, USPS and the IRS. Unfortunately, on top of that, scammers are also taking advantage of crisis events like the Japan earthquake and tsunamis.

It’s just important to pay attention to what you are opening up or downloading before you do it. If you’re careful and take the necessary precautions, you should most likely be able to avoid any issues.

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