Author: Ron
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✴︎ blogSlain Mexican Journalist’s Colleagues Targeted With NSO Spyware
Photo Source: ContraLínea.com.mx Javier Valdez Cárdenas was an award-winning Mexican investigative journalist known for his reporting on drug trafficking and organized crime. As with dozens of other investigative journalists in Mexico, Cárdenas’ brave reporting ended up having lethal consequences. On May 15, 2017 around noon, Cárdenas was forcibly removed from his vehicle and gunned down…
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✴︎ blogSaudi-linked Cyber Espionage Against Canadian Victim Discovered
Figure 1: The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia to Canada (September 2018; Credit: Ron Deibert) Today, the Citizen Lab is publishing a major new report, “The Kingdom Came to Canada: How Saudi-Linked Digital Espionage Reached Canadian Soil,” by Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Adam Senft, Bahr Abdul Razzak, and myself. Our report details how we discovered…
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✴︎ blogWatching NSO Group
I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report, authored by Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Sarah McKune, Bahr Abdul Razzak, and myself, entitled “Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries.” This report is the latest in a major research area for the Citizen Lab: the proliferation and abuse…
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✴︎ blogDigital Security for Whom or What?
With data surrounding us and networked into everything we do, the security of our data, both in transit and while at rest, is an obvious public safety issue. Which makes it puzzling why governments — whose principal job, since at least the time of Thomas Hobbes, is to keep us safe — have repeatedly sought…
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✴︎ blogSweeping the Internet for Netsweeper
The LGBTQ news website, “Gay Today,” is blocked in Bahrain; the website for Greenpeace International is blocked in the UAE; a matrimonial dating website is censored in Afghanistan; all of the World Health Organization’s website, including sub-pages about HIV/AIDS information, is blocked in Kuwait; an entire category of websites labeled “Sex Education,” are all censored…
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✴︎ blogIntroducing QUANTUM-as-a-Service
Imagine that your device could be silently commandeered and used to spy on you simply because you surfed the web. No need for anyone to have possession of it and physically install something. No need to trick you into downloading spyware, clicking on a malicious link, or entering your credentials into a phony login page.…
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✴︎ blogA Year in the Life of a Phishing Operation
It’s often remarked that digital espionage can be undertaken on the cheap. But just how cheap? In a new Citizen Lab report released this morning, we give one answer. Taking advantage of simple errors committed by the operator of a phishing operation, we were able to get an “inside view” of just what it takes…
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✴︎ blogA close look at the proposed “CSE Act”
The Citizen Lab is releasing a new report today, in collaboration with our partners at the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), entitled, “Analysis of the Communications Security Establishment Act and Related Provisions in Bill C-59.” The 75 page report provides a detailed overview of Canada’s SIGINT agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), an…
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✴︎ blogEthiopian Cyber Espionage with Israel-based Commercial Spyware
Citizen Lab has published a new report today in which we uncover a major global cyber espionage campaign targeting numerous individuals in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and more than a dozen other countries. Strong circumstantial evidence points to Ethiopia, with the surveillance technology supplied by an Israel-based company, Cyberbit Solutions. WIRED has…
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✴︎ blogCitizen Lab Submission to UN SR on Online Violence Against Women
In March 1994, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights appointed a “Special Rapporteur on violence against women, including its causes and consequences”. The current Special Rapporteur is Dr. Dubravka Šimonović. Recently, Dr. Šimonović issued a call for submissions on the topic of “online violence against women” and Citizen Lab decided to make such a…