The Syrian Computer Society () is an organization in

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

. It was founded by Bassel al-Assad in 1989, and was subsequently headed by his brother

Bashar al-Assad Bashar al-Assad (born 11September 1965) is a Syrian politician, military officer and former dictator Sources characterising Assad as a dictator: who served as the president of Syria from 2000 until fall of the Assad regime, his government ...

, who would later become the President of Syria. It acts as Syria's domain name registration authority and has been reported to be closely associated with the Syrian state. In May 2013, 700 domains registered by Syrians, mostly hosted at servers with IP addresses assigned to the Syrian Computer Society, were reported to have been seized by the U.S. DNS infrastructure operator

Network Solutions Network Solutions, LLC, formerly Web.com, is an American-based technology company and a subsidiary of Web.com, the 4th-largest .com domain name registrar, with over 6.7 million registrations as of August 2018. In addition to being a domain name ...

. The domain names became registered to "OFAC Holding", believed to be a reference to the U.S. federal government's

Office of Foreign Assets Control The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the United States Department of the Treasury, United States Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade economic sanctions, ...

. Some members of the Syrian Computer Society belonged to the first group of supporters of the

Syrian Electronic Army The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA; ) was a group of hacker (computer security), computer hackers which first surfaced online in 2011 to support the government of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Using spamming, website defacement, malware, ...

References

External links

* Organizations based in Syria Organizations established in 1989 Domain name registries Domain name seizures by United States {{internet-stub