Unfortunately, Syrian government is using the same tactics which used by other governments in the region to crack down on bloggers, activists, and netizens.
As most Middle East countries, Syria has one of the worst ICT infrastructures in the region with slow connections, vulnerable and centralized networks. As I stated before, authorities are keen to leave these vulnerabilities. They manage to exploit these vulnerabilities to put the entire infrastructure under surveillance or even block specific contents or websites.
Syria is also listed among the worst countries in the world when it comes to Internet freedom and categorized under Internet Enemies by Reports without Borders.
Syrian government is the only government in the world to detain a 19 years old blogger!
The same scenario in all Middle East countries due to corruption, monopoly, and lack of regulations and democracy…
While Egyptian government cut off the Internet during Egypt uprising, Syrian government implemented a semi-professional attack to crack down on activists on social networks.
As Syrian Telecom ministry is controlling the Internet and all ISPs, they launched an attack called “Man in the Middle Attack” to trace and hack into users accounts on Facebook.
It is very simple for any attacker to launch this type of attack especially when the attacker is the government who control the Internet and ICT infrastructure..!
The Telecom Company issued forged certificate for facebook secure logins (HTTPS). Unfortunately not all users are aware of the fake certificate problems and might pass the browser warning. In this case they become victims of the attack. Their logins, traces, information, and privacy are under government control.
According to this blog, he discovered the forged SSL certificate and explained what happened in Arabic.
Activists in Syria started to use TOR as a proxy to access Facebook to get rid of government surveillance. But many ISPs blocked TOR in Syria!
EFF published special warning for Syrian users regarding this fake certificate.
This forged certificate attack reminds us of Iranian Comodo hacker!
It is known that Iran is helping Syrian regime put down protests. Syria’s Assad is not a friend to western countries and there is no evidence that he is using western technology to censor or control the ICT infrastructure. Did he use Iranian technology?
According to US intelligence, he did..!