Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Helmi Noman was interviewed in a number of media outlets this week on the subject of Syria’s online conflict. Noman spoke about the increasingly sectarian aspect of the cyber conflict, which stretches back to the start of the war.
The Citizen Lab, through the Information Warfare Monitor project, has been tracking the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) since 2011 and, in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has also documented targeted malware attacks against the Syrian opposition through a series of blog posts (see here, here, here, and here). The SEA was back in the limelight in August when the group claimed credit for the attack on a domain name registrar which left the website of The New York Times inaccessible for several hours.
Helmi Noman, who authored a report titled The Emergence of Open and Organized Pro-Government Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian Electronic Army, was interviewed by Foreign Policy, Tech Week Europe, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Global News, and NBC News on SEA.
In June, the Citizen Lab published a report on the SEA titled A Call to Harm: New Malware Attacks Target the Syrian Opposition. Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire spoke to The New York Times about SEA’s surveillance campaign and Director Ron Deibert joined Al Jazeera’s The Stream program to talk about the SEA’s electronic attacks against both Arab and Western websites.
Read the latest interview in Foreign Policy, and coverage in CNN, Global News and NBC News.
And read Noman’s other recent interviews with CNN here and here.