Assad's Shadow Army

Supporters of the Syrian dictator are using hacker tactics to counter pro-democracy activists.



For all the praise that social media received in toppling Arab dictators this year, few paid attention to these regimes' practice of enlisting hackers and cyber warriors to support entrenched governments. While the Egyptian government was attempting to fully shut down Internet access in the country, regimes in Iran and Syria were busy recruiting their own "cyber armies" to fight back against pro-democracy bloggers, Twitter accounts, and Facebook users.

A collective of pro-Assad hackers and online activists calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army appears to be targeting dissidents in Syria, as well as sympathisers outside of the country. They have been launching electronic attacks against both Arab and Western websites' Facebook pages, and typically coordinate attacks using their own Facebook page. The group even coordinates attacks against the infamous international hacker collective Anonymous.

Although the group denies any affiliation with the government, President Bashar al-Assad directly referenced the pro-government hacking group, saying in a June 20th speech that "young people have an important role to play at this stage, because they have proven themselves to be an active power. There is the Electronic Army which has been a real army in virtual reality."

The Army's online activities are organized around three main kinds of effort: defacement attacks against Syrian opposition websites, defacement attacks against Western websites, and spamming popular Facebook pages.

Even President Barack Obama's personal Facebook page was spammed with comments in support of the Syrian regime. Some read, "We love Bashar Alassad so, leave us alone Obama!"

Facebook routinely removes pages belonging to the SEA for violating its Terms of Use, but the counter-revolutionaries are typically quick to create new pages in order to continue organising attacks.

Attempts by The Stream to contact the Syrian Electronic Army via Twitter for a response were rebuffed. SEA member and Twitter user @syriancommando wrote "@ASE It's no longer acceptable for us to speak directly to Al Jazeera as it is calling for war on our country. Not personal."

On this episode of The Stream, Ron Deibert will be joining the show via Skype from the Citizen Lab in Toronto, where he studies the geopolitics of cyberspace and is an expert on the Syrian Electronic Army's activities.