Author: Ron
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✴︎ blogFrom Russia, with Tainted Love
I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report, entitled “Tainted Leaks: Disinformation and Phishing With a Russian Nexus.” The report is authored by the Citizen Lab’s Adam Hulcoop, John Scott-Railton, Peter Tanchak, Matt Brooks, and myself, and can be found here. Our report uncovers a major disinformation and cyber espionage campaign with hundreds…
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✴︎ blogWe Chat (But Not about Everything)
Imagine if your favourite social media application silently censored your posts, but gave you no information about what topics are censored. Imagine if everything seemed fine as you posted message after message and image after image, for days on end with no issues, but then occasionally one of your posts would simply not appear without…
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✴︎ blogTaming the “Wild West” Commercial Spyware Market
Today, my colleague Sarah McKune and I co-authored an article, entitled “Who’s Watching Little Brother? A Checklist for Accountability in the Industry Behind Government Hacking.” A blog post about the report can be found here, and the article is available in PDF here. The report outlines a “checklist” for regulating the commercial spyware market. As we…
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✴︎ blogMexico, NSO Group, and the Soda Tax
I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report, entitled “Bitter Sweet: Supporters of Mexico’s Soda Tax Targeted With NSO Exploit Links,” authored by John Scott-Railton, Bill Marczak, Claudio Guarnieri, and Masashi Crete-Nishihata. The full report is here: https://citizenlab.org/2017/02/bittersweet-nso-mexico-spyware/ New York Times has an exclusive here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/technology/hack-mexico-soda-tax-advocates.html In recent years, the research of the Citizen…
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✴︎ blogThe Easy and Affordable Way to Undertake Cyber Espionage
I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report, entitled “Nile Phish: Large-Scale Phishing Campaign Targeting Egyptian Civil Society,” authored by the Citizen Lab’s John Scott-Railton, Bill Marczak, and Etienne Maynier, in collaboration with Ramy Raoof of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. The full report is here: https://citizenlab.org/2017/02/nilephish-report/ When most of us think…
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✴︎ blogThe DHS/FBI Report on Russian Hacking was a Predictable Failure
Russian cyber espionage against American political targets has dominated the news in recent months, intensifying last week with President Barack Obama’s announcement of sanctions against Russia. Cyber espionage is, of course, nothing new. But using data collected in cyber espionage operations to interfere in the U.S. election process on behalf of one of the candidates…
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✴︎ blogWeChat: “One App, Two Systems”
Days are long gone when we used to interact with the Internet as an undifferentiated network. The reality today is that what we communicate online is mediated by companies that own and operate the Internet services we use. Social media in particular have become, for an increasing number of people, their windows on reality. Whether,…
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✴︎ blogWhat to do about “dual use” digital technologies?
The following is my written testimony to the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights – Canada, which will take place November 30, 2016 at 11:30 AM EST and video webcast here.)* Background For over a decade, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto has researched and documented information controls…
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✴︎ blogJust Enough to Do the Job: Targeted Attacks on Tibetans
I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report, entitled “It’s Parliamentary: KeyBoy and the targeting of the Tibetan Community.” The report is authored by the Citizen Lab’s Adam Hulcoop, Etienne Maynier, John Scott Railton, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, and Matt Brooks and can be found here: https://citizenlab.org/2016/11/parliament-keyboy/ In this report, the authors track a malware operation…
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✴︎ blogWhat Lies Beneath China’s Live-Streaming Apps?
Today, the Citizen Lab is releasing a new report, entitled: “Harmonized Histories? A year of fragmented censorship across Chinese live streaming platforms.” The report is part of our NetAlert series, and can be found here. Live-streaming media apps are extraordinarily popular in mainland China, used by millions. Similar in functionality to the US-based and Twitter-owned streaming…