Syria disappears from the internet

This would be expected right before a major military attack. On a scale of 1-10 this is about an eight in terms of signaling a major offensive. But I have noticed horrendous inconsistencies in both events and coverage of them as if confused panic were the intended result.

Nonetheless a global conflict is inevitable, barring a massive shift in human consciousness. And given recent developments around Syria I am taking this very seriously. Experience says that -- if this is what it looks like -- a major air assault, likely including the US and NATO is imminent.

---Mike Ruppert

Syria Traffic Goes "Dark" As Country Disappears From Internet

Zero Hedge,

7 May, 2013

While there have been no new military attacks on Syria since Sunday morning, something more peculiar happened in the past few hours, when according to Akamai and various other Internet traffic trackers, Syria has literally gone "dark", or, as Umbrella Security Labs describes it, as if "Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet."

Some more from Umbrella's blog:

At around 18:45 UTC OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.

The graph below shows DNS traffic from and to Syria. Although Twitter remains relatively silent, the drop in both inbound and outbound traffic from Syria is clearly visible. The small amount of outbound traffic depicted by the chart indicates our DNS servers trying to reach DNS servers in Syria.

Currently both TLD servers for Syria, ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.sy are unreachable.  The remaining two nameservers sy.cctld.authdns.ripe.net. and pch.anycast.tld.sy. are reachable since they are not within Syria.

The Umbrella Security Labs also reported on an Internet blackout in Syria November of 2012, where we shared details of the top 10 most failed domains during the outage. 

Update: 1:28 p.m. PDT

There have been numerous incidents where access to and from the Internet in Syria was shut down. Shutting down Internet access to and from Syria is achieved by withdrawing the BGP routes from Syrian prefixes. The graph below shows the sudden drop in visibility for Syrian network prefixes.

How it happened:

Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP distributes routing information and makes sure all routers on the Internet know how to get to a certain IP address. When an IP range becomes unreachable it will be withdrawn from BGP, this informs routers that the IP range is no longer reachable.

For example, one of the name servers for the DNS zone .SY is ns1.tld.sy with IP address 82.137.200.85.

Normally our routers would expect a BGP route for 82.137.192.0/18

Currently that route has disappeared and we no longer have a way to reach the Nameservers for .SY that reside in Syria

And in parallel news, we are hearing unconfirmed reports that mobile connections have been cut off as well.

Did Assad simply forget to pay his country's DNS (and cell) bill, or is this a preamble to putting Syria in the "dark" in advance of possible future military escalations? We will provide updates as we see them.

Syria's internet in apparent blackout

Monitoring companies say access to internet appears to have been cut off in country

An internet cafe in Damascus. Monitoring services have reported a blackout in Syria, and Google says traffic has dropped off. Photograph: Benjamin Choquette/Alamy

the Guardian,

7 May, 2013

Access to the internet in Syria appeared to have been cut off on Monday evening, according to a number of monitoring companies, prompting speculation that the apparent blackout was an attempt by the Syrian government to disrupt the online activities of opponents.

Google also said that its services in the country were inaccessible and released data showing its web traffic in the country dramatically tailing off late in the day.

Monitoring companies reported a similar blackout last November in Syria, where activists seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad have repeatedly uploaded videos to YouTube showing atrocities allegedly being carried out on behalf of the government, and used internet telephony products such as Skype to testify about attacks by government forces on rebel positions and civilians.

The Syrian government blamed "terrorists" for the disconnection in November.

A US internet security firm reported on Monday that it had initially noticed a significant drop in traffic from Syria, adding "On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the internet.

"Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from internet communication with the rest of the world," wrote Dan Hubbard, chief technology officer at OpenDNS.

"It's unclear whether internet communication within Syria is still available. Although we can't yet comment on what caused this outage, past incidents were linked to both government-ordered shutdowns and damage to the infrastructure, which included fibre cuts and power outages.

The apparent blackout was also reported by Renesys, an internet monitoring service which picked up on the disconnection in November.

Last year, Renesys pointed out that some Syrian webservers had survived the November outage – but that they were located "offshore", and included a number which were used to target Syrian activists with malware targeting Skype last summer.

The Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak cut the country's internet connection with the rest of the world in January 2011, when the levels of protest were growing in the country. The outage lasted a week, but did not prevent the ousting of Mubarak.