Internet and Phone Access Cut Off For Second Day

Since Tuesday afternoon, Internet activity has completely dropped off in Syrica according to multiple sources. 

Internet monitoring firm Renesys confirmed yesterday afternoon via a tweet about the "loss of Syrian Internet connectivity 18:43 UTC. BGP routes down, inbound traces failing."

Google also certified the inaccessibility of Internet in Syria via a tweet with a link to its Transparency Report showing a complete drop in internet activity as seen from the graphic below.

There's still a blackout as of Wednesday, 5/8 with government media reports blaming a “fault in fiber optic cables,” according to Dubai-based news organization Al-Jazeera.

The excuse of a fiber optic failure doesn't seem to sit quite right as it would require the simultaneous interruption of four separate fiber optic cables that bring bandwidth into Syria. Not only that, but there are several other countries that share the same cable and yet none of them are experiencing any type of failure.

There could be several reasons why the Syrian government would want to shut down the internet (this wouldn't be the first time it has done so), however at this point we can only speculate as to the real reasons behind the internet shutdown.

Assad Sympathizers Attack Multiple BBC Twitter Accounts

Multiple BBC Twitter accounts, which include weather, Arabic and other feeds were taken over by Syrian regime supporters.

It has been confirmed by Chris Hamilton who is the social media editor for BBC news that their twitter feed was indeed hacked.

This hacking is only the latest event to happen to corporate Twitter accounts. 

The BBC has confirmed that is back in control of all of its accounts as of last Thursday by about 3 pm which is when all the inappropriate/fake tweets were removed.

The attacks were initiated early Thursday morning; during this time a phishing email had been sent to several BBC staff which could have exposed password details. 

Social engineering

These attacks are the latest to happen in a series taht has seen Burger King, Chrysler and other high profile twitter accounts get hacked. 

"The most likely source of the hack is via social engineering - someone managing to elicit the password by fooling the user who keeps the password," Professor Alan Woodward of the department of computing at the University of Surrey stated.

Due to all these hacks that are occurring  industry experts are calling for Twitter to beef up their security and offer two-factor authentication.

Thankfully this latest hack doesn't seem to have used BBCs brand name to get users to click on malicious links or sign up for any type of scams, instead being a hack done by the Syrian Electronic Army for spreading political messages about Syria. 

Remember, you should always use unique passwords for any of your online accounts that are both hard to guess and hard to crack, so they should be at  least 8 characters long and contain numbers, special characters, and alternate capitalization. The password should also be unique to that specific online account and not be used for all your accounts. 

For more information on network security and support, check out Iconic Mind.