Syria Internet Down But Spyware Still Connecting Out

It appears the Syrian government is closing the country off from the rest of the world, shutting down Internet access.

Some connections are still up and running, although it appears they are being used by some servers used to talk and deliver spyware to Syrian activists.

Reports have also claimed mobile and landline phone communications have been intermittently down and access to Damascus airport closed, amidst fighting on the road leading to the facility. Dubai-based Emirates airline has suspended flights to the Syrian capital, as government forces of president Bashar al-Assad war with rebels across the Middle Eastern country.

At around 10.30am GMT, or 12.30pm local time, Syria Internet connectivity collapsed, according to both Renesas and Akamai, which monitor global traffic.

Syria Internet outages

“In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet,” Renesas said in a blog post.

“There are a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the Internet, still reachable by traceroutes, and indeed still hosting Syrian content.

“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.

“These five offshore survivors include the webservers that were implicated in the delivery of malware targeting Syrian activists in May of this year.”

Below is Akamai’s graph of how the Internet suddenly disappeared in the country:

This is the second time in a matter of months connections in war-torn Syria have been cut off. In July, Renesas reported that all networks routed through the incumbent ISP, Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, went down.

That was only for 40 minutes, however. Today’s outage has been going on for around six hours so far.

In June 2011, two-thirds of the country’s networks were cut off, killing Syria Internet for many. It coincided with massive anti-government protests.

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