Syria's cyberwars: using social media against dissent

For years, average Syrians were blocked from Facebook, YouTube and other social media by Bashar al-Assad’s repressive police-state government. Early last year, however, as the Arab Spring swept through the region, something odd happened: The social media sites that were pivotal to uprisings in other Arab nations were suddenly switched back on.

Now we know why: It's easier to track people –and find out who is against you – if you can monitor computer traffic to such sites, or trick visitors into clicking on tainted links that download spyware onto their computers, rights activists and cyber experts say.

To a far greater degree than Libya, Egypt or perhaps any other nation in the Arab world, Syria's government has succeeded in flipping activists' use of digital tools and social media to the government's own advantage, cyber experts with an eye on Syria say.

A "Syrian Revolution" page showed up on Facebook in March 2011, winning 41,000 fans in just a few days, and 138,000 a few weeks later, a recent report found. By last month, it had 438,000 fans. But frequenting such pages may be potentially hazardous, as well as educational or motivational.

"Online social media, which virtually anyone can use from home, played a central role in the Syrian uprising and helped break the decades-old government media monopoly," Amjad Baiazy, a Syrian researcher living in London writes in a new study published last month by MediaPolicy.org, a London-based new media think tank. "But it helped the Syrian government crack down on activists."

As bombs fall and bullets fly, dissidents and opposition figures have had their favorite social media tools turned against them, and their cloak of anonymity pierced by veiled online hackers loyal to Syria's government.

Last fall, the government bought centralized Internet eavesdropping equipment. But dropping spyware directly onto activists’ computers is Syria's newest cyberwar trend.

Luring opposition sympathizers with tainted video links in e-mail, fake Skype encryption tools, tainted online documents, hackers believed to be allied to Syria's government have in recent months deployed an array of powerful spyware with names like DarkComet, backdoor.bruet, and Blackshades. Available on the Internet, these malware are used to infiltrate the personal computers of opposition figures and rights activists and send back information on their friends and contacts as well as passwords, cybersecurity experts say. The impact of this spying is hard to gauge. But even as the physical battle intensifies in and around Damascas, Syria cyber watchers are worried.

The Syrian regime had long blocked access to social media sites, says Richard Zaluski, president of the Center for Strategic Cyberspace and Security Science, a London-based think tank. 

"Blocking, however, prevented the tracking down of activists, so the regime ultimately responded by unblocking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter,” he writes in a recent analysis posted on the group's website. “This move enabled the regime’s security apparatus to conduct its internal cyber war against its own people and aided in tracking down the identities of activists." 

Alongside open electronic forums, blogs have been used by thousands of Syrians to launch a counteroffensive against the government’s curbs on public expression, Mr. Baiazy's study, called "Syria's Cyber Wars," notes. These forums also provide a way for users to share information on how to bypass government website blocking. At least seven Facebook groups provide Syrians with technical means for remaining anonymous while on the Internet. 

1 | 2

Next