Syrian Malware Servers Survive, Then Die

Nerval's Lobster writes "A massive outage knocked Syria's Internet offline Nov. 29 — with the exception of five servers implicated in serving malware earlier this year. But the next day, those five servers went dark as well. Internet analytics firm Renesys suggested late Nov. 29 that those five servers were likely offshore. 'Now, there are a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the Internet, still reachable by traceroutes, and indeed still hosting Syrian content,' the company wrote in a blog post. 'These are five networks that use Syrian-registered IP space, but the originator of the routes is actually Tata Communications. These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic, and perhaps not subject to whatever killswitch was thrown today within Syria.' By the morning of Nov. 30, those five servers went offline. 'The last 5 networks belonging to Syria, a set of smaller netblocks previously advertised by Tata Communications, have been torn down and are no longer routed,' Renesys wrote." CloudFlare has a blog post confirming that the Syrian government was responsible for flipping the switch, contrary to their claims. Meanwhile, Anonymous has started targeting the Syrian government's remaining websites and helping to get communications channels flowing out of Syria. Google is reminding people of its Speak2Tweet service, which lets people post to Twitter through voicemail over still-functioning phone lines.

Netcraft confirms it:

[Anonymous Coward]

Syria is dead.

Re:

[jonadab]

Syria has always been dead. In no public or private utterance can it be admitted that situation has at any time been otherwise. Officially the change of status has never happened. Netcraft has confirmed that Syria is dead: therefore, Netcraft has always confirmed that Syria is dead, and thus Syria has always been dead. The failing third-world government of the moment always represents absolute evil, and thus it follows that any past or future situation in which that government might not be failing is imp

Re:

[jonadab]

Just in case someone feels like being an idiot and taking my little allusion for more than the small bit of attempted humor that it is, I should probably clarify: I am not even remotely interested in taking sides in the current conflict in Syria. Please don't try to read anything political into my above post. It wasn't intended that way. It's just supposed to be silly and funny, that's all. Thanks.

Well they're obviously

[Chrisq]

Well they're obviously te Syrian suicide-bomb servers.

Distributed/ad hoc internetworking

[Toe, The]

I've heard of ideas and even projects for ad hoc internetworking and/or phone networking. In these, there is no authoritative routing, but rather meshes of individual nodes (perhaps with uplinks to the "regular" internet/network).

Obviously there are enormous obstacles to developing such a thing. It's hard; it's fragile; it's messy; it's confusing to the user; and it's not profitable.

But when we read stories like this... shouldn't we give it some more thought?

Re:

[timeOday]

I actually think it would help immensely if such a service were not anonymous, and (by convention) limited to short text messages - basically like twitter. This is for two reasons, first, I simply don't think people will get excited about being mules for who knows what data payload; and second, a protocol reliant on happenstance proximity of cellphones towards an unknown exit node will be plenty slow and inefficient, even BEFORE intentionally routing it every which way for anonymity. I just don't think it'

Re:

[jonadab]

I've given the notion quite a bit of thought, and I eventually concluded, somewhat reluctantly, that it's not practicable on a large scale, for fundamental reasons that have nothing to do with any specific design or protocol that might be attempted.

However, there are usually ways to get information in or out of a place that's disconnected from the internet for whatever reason. Ultimately, if *any* kind of communication in or out of the country is possible, somebody can use it indirectly to get information

nothing "confirmed"

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone knowing anything about BGP and stuff can tell that there are no more facts than this:

All IP ranges behind AS29386 seem to be offline.

Other than that, all we have is speculation. Cloudflame is in no position to "confirm" something.
It could be this way, it could be another way around.

It would not surprise me if some stupid gov shut of parts of internet. But in this case even the Syrian official TV channel had no internet and their daily press overview programme was forced to use only papers.

Also of not

Good news for IPv4!

[pepsikid]

Ya know what I think? I think we just freed up 84 unused netblocks for the rest of the Internet to use.

Now why would the Syrian government want to....

[3seas]

...commit genocide?

They know the world is watching and there are always ways of communicating around such a blackout, but the majority of people who'd speak up in disgust of what the government is apparently planning are not going to see it.

Its like news media hitting the mass market, only here it the sources of real news.

Re:

[Threni]

Nobody cares what is happening in Syria. Think of all the headlines of the last few years about Libya, Egypt, Iraq etc etc. It's in the news for a few days/weeks then the focus of attention moves elsewhere. X killed, Y removed from power, Rebels are fighting government forces in Z. The internet is up, the internet is down, bloggers tweet about blah blah. So it goes on. Not saying it's not important to people in that area, or who know people who are affected. But people watch the news, generally, for

Re:

[Immerial]

It is clear that it was done deliberately by Syria... FTFA "In order for a whole-country outage, all four of these cables would have had to been cut simultaneously. That is unlikely to have happened."

My worst fear is that they are going to try either chemical weapons or indiscriminate slaughter (whole towns/cities/women/children/refugees). If those reports got out they would lose what little international support they have from Russia and China, and that would basically be it. All the nations would swoo

Speak to tweet?

[jeffmeden]

Is this really a thing? A service where your voice gets turned into an anonymized URL and posted to a generic twitter handle? Sounds productive... I wish Google would remind people that when phone lines work, maybe call a PERSON and make REAL contact, don't just shout into the void. This twitter obsession is nuts.

Re:

[valkraider]

I don't like Twitter either. But a single tweet can reach hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. When you call a person, you reach - well - that person. I say we need Speak to Slashdot. ;)

Thats a reason, why all people should prefer

[someones]

Thats a reason, why all people should prefer small autonomous over global decentralised over centralised networks for communication.

Killing off one centralised service is easy.
If you have enought control, you can even cut a global decentralised network into 2 or more.

But try killing off 100000 of small autonomous networks - if they are not even known - and noone knows them all - , how should they be killed?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And what are, the downsides? I can't think of, any at all, he said sarcastically and with random commas.