This edition of the Middle East and North Africa CyberWatch discusses censorship and filtering, surveillance, blogger and netizen arrests and more.

Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Helmi Noman spoke to media this week about the Syrian Electronic Army and the latest hacking of the Associated Press’ verified Twitter account.

Noman discussed the recent Twitter compromises, techniques believed to be used (phishing URLs), and how the regional dimensions of the conflict in Syria is reflected on the Internet (e.g., defacement of Iranian and Russian websites over their support to Syrian regime).

This edition of the Middle East and North Africa CyberWatch covers topics such as censorship and surveillance, blogger and netizen arrests, cyber attacks and technological developments from the region.

The Citizen Lab report “The Canadian Connection: An investigation of Syrian government and Hezbullah web hosting in Canada” and its follow-up, “The Canadian Connection: One Year Later”, have been mentioned in the media in relation to the recent shutting down of Internet networks by the Assad regime in Syria.

This edition of the Middle East and North Africa CyberWatch covers topics such as censorship and filtering, blogger and netizen arrests, Internet and social media use, and technology.

This is an update to our November 2011 report titledThe Canadian Connection: An investigation of Syrian government and Hezbullah web hosting in Canada, which examined the use of web servers based in Canada, the U.S., and European countries to host Syrian government websites and websites of the Lebanese political party Hezbullah. Our findings indicate that, while many of the websites we examined in 2011 have changed hosting providers, a number of Syrian government and Hezbullah websites still maintain an online presence through the services of North American and European web hosts.

This edition of the Middle East and North Africa CyberWatch covers topics such as censorship and filtering, blogger and netizen arrests, cyber attacks, and more.

This edition of the Middle East and North Africa CyberWatch covers topics such as censorship and filtering, blogger and netizen arrests, Internet and social media use, and more.