Recent Posts
Ron Deibert’s blog.
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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…
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✴︎ blogCanada’s new national security bill: one step forward, two steps back?
Over the last year, the Canadian government has been engaged in extensive public consultations meant to address widespread concerns around C-51 (the anti-terror law implemented by Prime Minister Harper’s government) as well as a range of other national security practices, policies, and oversight and public accountability issues raised by Canadians. (I participated in some of…
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✴︎ blogKorean Child Monitoring Applications: Insecure by Design
Nearly every day it seems, a friend asks about how to cope with a digital security risk. Among those with the most acute concerns are parents of minor children, many of whom now carry with them mobile devices. Parents ask how they can protect their children from inappropriate content, whether their child’s use of their…
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✴︎ blogMexican Surveillance Abuse Continues
We are publishing yet another update to the ongoing investigations Citizen Lab has been conducting, in partnership with R3D, SocialTic, and Article 19, on abuse of commercial spyware in Mexico. Our latest report shows that the Claudio X. González, director of the Mexican anti-corruption organization Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad (MCCI), was…
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✴︎ blogYet More Evidence of Gross Misuse of NSO Group Spyware In Mexico
The Citizen Lab’s investigation into the abuse of commercial spyware in Mexico continues with yet more troubling findings. Today, we are releasing a new report that affirms two additional individuals’ phones were targeted with Israeli-based NSO Group’s sophisticated Pegasus spyware technology. As in some of the prior cases we researched, the individuals in question…
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✴︎ blogLetter to Blackstone Group Regarding Possible Acquisition of NSO Group
For the last year, Citizen Lab has written five separate reports that document extensive abuse of, and lack of controls around the use of spyware manufactured by the Israeli cyber warfare company, NSO Group. These reports are part of a larger interest we have at the Citizen Lab in the lack of controls around the…
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✴︎ blogA World Without Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo died of cancer last week. A veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and one of the authors of the Charter 08 manifesto advocating for democratic reform, Liu was China’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner. In spite of Liu’s advocacy for non-violent change, Chinese authorities sentenced Liu in 2009 to eleven years’ imprisonment…