Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Helmi Noman and the Information Warfare Monitor have released a detailed report on the activities of the Syrian Electronic Army. Since the beginning of the popular uprisings and protests in the Middle East and North Africa, events in the region have been characterized by increased contestation in cyberspace among regime sympathizers, governments, and opposition movements. One component of this contestation is the tendency among governments and networks of citizens supportive of the state to use offensive computer network attacks. Such tactics are supplements to legal, regulatory, and other controls, and technical forms of Internet censorship. For example, a group known as the Iranian Cyber Army has defaced Twitter and Iranian opposition websites. Also, Tunisian political activists and Yemeni oppositional websites have both accused their government security organizations of launching attacks on their sites in an attempt to silence their message and deny access to their content. In this report, we document the activities of the Syrian Electronic Army, which appears to be a case of an open and organized pro-government computer attack group that is actively targeting political opposition and Western websites. Our aim is to assess to what extent we can find evidence of Syrian government assistance for the attack groups, and what the significance of the attacks themselves are for civil society and cyberspace contestation. See the full post here: http://www.infowar-monitor.net/2011/05/7349/ Masashi Nishihata Research Manager, Citizen Lab Munk School of Global Affairs University of Toronto e: masashi@kmdi.utoronto.ca w: http://www.citizenlab.org _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE