The Internet Blackout in Syria – The Real Story

Before ensuing about the story, lets first look back two years and figure out what exactly went wrong when Syria became totally blacked out – a sudden disengage from the rest of the world, which resulted in a 3 day Internet blackout in 2012. Well now, the question was! Was it the Syrian Government behind this blackout?

The dim-out took place exactly during the period of intense and profound ongoing civil wars in Syria. So, as it is supposed, it was assumed that it was the fault of the Syrian government. But, the Syrian Minister stood his ground and made it clear that the government had not disabled the internet, instead the outage was caused by the cable cut by the terrorists to emphasize their existence. Although, when investigated it didn’t seem likely to be a terrorist’s work.

And so, the question came up again on who exactly was the reason for this Syrian Internet Blackout? Well, the answer to that was NSA. The very agency responsible for number of other major happenings.

National Security Agency (NSA) – the agency powered with the strength of God, had ruled over the confidentiality and privacy of the entire world from countries to personages. This organization had the access to read anyone’s data, infringe into large fibre networks, and can narrow out anyone, at any place and at any time.

SECRET BEHIND SYRIA’s 2012 INTERNET BLACKOUT

The latest revelation from the global reconnaissance whistle-blower Edward Snowden removed the mask from yet another Agency’s secret- a 2012 incident that took Syria’s internet status from “Online” to “Offline” was caused by the NSA was nothing but a blunder.

Written by: Annon

In an interview with esteemed journalist James Bamford from Wired magazine published today, Snowden stated that their elite hacking unit in the NSA, very well known as Tailored Access Operations(TAO), inadvertently took most of Syria of the Internet World Map, while make an attempt to insinuate the country’s traffic.

WHAT IF NSA SUCCESSFUL

The TAO unit had supposedly been making an effort to mount a malware by exploiting a liability in the router of the main Syrian ISP that would have allowed the agency to readdress the traffic from the central router to the system tapped by NSA’s turmoil packet capture system and the Xkeyscore packet processing system.

THAT Oops! MOMENT

Instead, the renowned TAO hackers successfully executed it, but to their dismay the plan backfired, as the unit accidently rendered the router, the very equipment it was trying to tap, causing the Syrian Internet to go under the sea. Snowden describes that instant as an “oh shit” moment at the TAO centre, where the NSA feared the moment when the Syrian Government would realize what they had done.

The incident proved to be really ironic, where the other parts of the American government was trying to keep Syria Connected, the TAO was trying to revert the damage done by them and cover their tracks, to no avail.

“Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage,” Bamford inked. Snowden told him that someone joked, “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel”.

It had been largely misunderstood to that the dim-out was caused by one of the opposing parties within Syria, be it the government itself or its rebels. This thought occurred to them since, there have been numerous occasions rooting to similar outages. While the Syrian government stood by its ground blaming the “Terrorists” for the outage caused.

This recent Snowden’s confession pronounces a humiliating part of US intelligence agency, but at the same time, the disclosure also made the list of perpetrators that people will consider, as such incidents are prone to occur there.

Links: Hide your identity from your internet provider & government and surf anonymously

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Resources:

http://thehackernews.com/2014/08/nsa-accidentally-took-down-syrias.html