Syrians lose Internet access, hacks on embassies vowed

Amid political unrest in Syria, more than half of Internet services were shut down as of Friday night (Manila time), an Internet intelligence group reported. Renesys said that some 40 of 59 networks, or two-thirds of all Syrian networks, became unreachable from the Internet at 3:35 p.m. UTC Friday (11:35 p.m in Manila). "We don't know yet how the outage was coordinated, or what specific regions or cities may be affected more than others. News is filtering out of Syria very slowly. If Egypt and Libya's Internet outages are any guide, one might conclude that events on the street in Syria are reaching a tipping point," it said in a blog post. For its part, Google reported that all of its services in Syria were inaccessible as of Friday. "Google services currently blocked in Syria," Google said in its Twitter account. Internet dependent on SyriaTel Renesys said that the Internet in Syria basically depends on one domestic provider, state-owned SyriaTel. SyriaTel buys most of its Internet transit from Turk Telekom and Deutsche Telekom, with some contribution from PCCW, Tata, and Telecom Italia. "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," it noted. As of Friday night, Renesys said the network prefixes that remain reachable include those belonging to the Syrian government, although many government websites are slow to respond or down. It said the sites of the Ministry of Education went down, along with those of the Damascus city government page and Syrian Customs. But as of 4 p.m. Saturday in Manila, only the Damascus City government page appeared down. Hackers vow to attack Syrian embassies' sites As this developed, hackers' group Anonymous vowed to attack the websites of Syrian embassies abroad, "So today we will begin a program of removing from the internet the web sites of the Syrian Embassies abroad. We will begin with these two Targets which we will delete from the interwebz at precisely 9:30 AM SYT on Saturday - June 4, 2011," it said. It said its initial targets are the Syrian embassies in France (www.amb-syr.fr) and Saudi Arabia (syrianembassy-sa.org). As of 4:45 p.m. (Manila time), however, the sites of both embassies still appeared online. "So long as Assad remains in power and the criminal and evil regime retains it's ability to torture, kill, and imprison their own people; Anonymouis will continue this campaign of removing the Syrian Embassy web sites from the internet and interfereing with the communications channels via Black Fax and E-Mail Bomb campaigns. The butchers of Syria can damn well EXPECT US !" Anonymous said. — TJD, GMA News