They got snarky. The world unfriended them.
Posted on 05/07/2013 2:38:05 PM PDT by SatinDoll
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.
umbrella-syria-bgp
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 When an IP range becomes unreachable it will be withdrawn from BGP, this informs routers that the IP range is no longer reachable.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.
Does Syria have a "kill switch"?
Or is this the work of Mossad, in a run-up to an invasion of Syria and Lebanon?
Is this a prelude to the apocalypse? /sarcasm
Anonymous threatened to shut Syria’s government servers down, because Syria blacked out the Internet to stop the rebels.
Yeah, credible that blog.
They got snarky. The world unfriended them.
bttt
Doy!
Hmmmm..
Hmmm..
but but.. who wins american idol? DWTS? WTOP?
Sounds like more trouble for Assad...
Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping!
To get onto The Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping List you must threaten to report me to the Mods if I don’t add you to the list...
Hey, Vlad! I'm here!!
Found this, no idea as to the reliability.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/05/07/war-has-begun/
We will have to wait and see.
Where does all the sales tax money go if the Internet is shut down? Enquiring minds want to know.
JF’nK (Lurch) could be a lie-in in the tomb of Lenin and give Vlad a rest.
It's not your money. It goes to Obama's Stash.
Israel is getting ready to hand Syria its rearend.
Another nutty conspiracy theory.
The only reason that the IDF would send an armored force into Syria would be to seize control of WMDs.
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