An Arbor Networks graphic showing the sudden drop-off in network traffic from Syria on November 29, 2012 as the country was essentially erased from network routing tables.
The National Security Agency inadvertently brought Syria's Internet to a screeching halt nationwide in 2012 after a failed attempt to hack into the war-torn country's communications data, according to a new claim by Edward Snowden.
The fugitive leaker, in a sprawling new interview with Wired, said that NSA agents tried to exploit a core router of a major Internet service provider in order to tap into Syria's emails. But the plot backfired, bringing the country's Internet down for days amid an escalating civil war.
When he went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton in early 2013, Snowden was already disillusioned with the government's surveillance practices but "had not lost his capacity for shock," writes James Bamford:
One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn't know that the U.S. government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)
Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an "oh shit" moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.
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. Back at TAO's operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: "If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel."
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government has periodically turned off Internet services in specific areas before launching an attack, according to The Washington Post. On at least three occasions, the sporadic outages, which have continued into this year, were nationwide.
Snowden: The NSA Caused a Massive Internet Blackout in Syria - NationalJournal.com
