Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert and Senior Researcher Sarah McKune authored a new article in CircleID on the often overlooked dimension of cyber threats and cyber espionage: the targeting of civil society actors.
“NGOs, exile organizations, political movements, and other public interest coalitions have for many years encountered serious and persistent cyber assaults. Such threats — politically motivated and often with strong links to authoritarian regimes — include website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, targeted malware attacks, and cyber espionage. For every Fortune 500 company that’s breached, for every blueprint or confidential trade secret stolen, it’s a safe bet that at least one NGO or activist has been compromised in a similar fashion, with highly sensitive information such as networks of contacts exfiltrated.”