[liberationtech] The Emergence of Open and Organized Pro-Government Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian Electronic Army

[Masashi Nishihata]

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 at kmdi.utoronto.ca
w: http://www.citizenlab.org

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