Internet Censorship Revealed Through the Haze of Malware Pollution

These graphs show the amount of IBR, or "malware" activity - and the sharp drops related to the actions by the Egyptian government (top) and Libyan government (bottom) in response to the political demonstrations that occurred in early 2011. The data was observed by the UC San Diego Network Telescope in terms of packets per second, or basic messages. The oscillating pattern (better seen in the top image) is due to human, or diurnal, patterns of activity because IBR mostly comes from users' personal computers, not computer servers. Images courtesy of CAIDA/SDSC. On a January evening in 2011, Egypt - with a population of 80 million, including 23 million Internet users - vanished from cyberspace after its government ordered an Internet blackout amidst anti-government protests that led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The following month, the Libyan government, also under siege, imposed an Internet "curfew" before completely cutting off access for almost four days. To help explain exactly how these governments disrupted the Internet, a team of scientists led by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego conducted an analysis based largely on the drop in a specific subset of observable Internet traffic that is a residual product of malware.