[2] After the mass protests of the Syrian revolution in 2011, the government of Bashar al-Assad had intensified cyber-surveillace measures and internet blockades across Syria.
[12] In May 2012 the committee to Protect Journalists named Syria the third most censored country in the world, saying:[13] In its campaign to silence media coverage, the government disabled mobile phones, landlines, electricity, and the Internet.
The pro-government online group the Syrian Electronic Army had frequently hacked websites to post pro-regime material, and the government had been implicated in malware attacks targeted at those reporting on the crisis.In addition to filtering a wide range of Web content, the Syrian government monitors Internet use very closely and had detained citizens "for expressing their opinions or reporting information online."
Vague and broadly worded laws invite government abuse and had prompted Internet users to engage in self-censorship to avoid the state's ambiguous grounds for arrest.
[15] After winning the 2007 presidential election in Syria with 99.82% of the declared votes, Bashar al-Assad implemented numerous measures that further intensified political and cultural repression.
Syrian government also intensifed its censorship of the Internet; banning access to more than 200 websites, including sites such as Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Spotify, Google Play, LinkedIn, DeviantArt, PayPal, Netflix, Scratch, etc.
In 2007, the Syrian government enacted a law that forced Internet cafes to keep records of all online comments posted by users in chat forums, as well as their browsing habits.
[29][better source needed] A graph that appeared in the Wall Street Journal shows the number of blocked access attempts to the-Syrian.com and other sites between August 1 and 5 2011.
[30] In October 2011 US based Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale, California acknowledged that Syria was using its devices to censor Web activity, a possible violation of US trade embargoes.
[31] In June 2012 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported that pro-Syrian-government malware campaigns had increased in frequency and sophistication and that a new Trojan distributed as a .pif file via Skype targets Syrian activists.
[32][33][34] On July 19, 2012, Internet access from Syria traveling via the state carrier Syrian Telecommunications Establishment was cut off for a period of 40 minutes.
Assad government's cyberforces engage in several social engineering techniques and online surveillance measures such as phishing, internet blackouts, malware attacks, interception of Skype calls, etc.
[49] In addition to the high-profile defacement and attacks on public targets, the SEA also carried out surveillance to discover the identities and location of Syrian rebels.