In an article published in the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s (IRPP) “Policy Options” blog, Research Fellow Jon Penney observed that the debate on Canada’s Bill C-51 Anti-Terror law has been “contentious and ranging, yet few commentators have drawn on experience or expert voices elsewhere to understand its implications.”
According to state media organization People’s Daily, Apple agreed to Chinese government “security checks.” Citizen Lab Research Fellow Jason Q. Ng expressed concern that this practice may set a trend of compliance to such demands amongst other firms.
Citizen Lab Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire was named on the Young Global Leaders list for the Class of 2015, an organization headed by the World Economic Forum. The community is intended to provide the next generation of leaders with a platform to engage global affairs for positive change.
In an article contributed to the National Post, Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons explains that the activities of the Communications Security Establishment constitute spying on Canadians. Parsons summarizes several findings regarding the mandate and practices of the organization leaked over the last year and a half, many of which strongly undermine CSE’s claim that Canadians are not “targeted” by domestic security agencies.
The Lahore High Court in Pakistan is set to hear a case regarding the discovery of spyware suite FinFisher in the country. The lawsuit, brought by Cyber Steward Partner Bytes for All, contends that the government contravened the Privacy Act by indiscriminately spying on its citizens.
In our blog post, we describe the results of tests we conducted to measure HTTPS support on the advertisers found on a sample of news websites as well as two sample lists of advertisers. We find a large disparity between our results and the the level of security support referred to in a recent post on the Internet Advertising Bureau’s website.
Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert authored an article entitled “Who Knows What Evils Lurk in the Shadows?” published on OpenCanada.org.
Citizen Lab Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire contributed to research related to Babar, a piece of malware believed to have been produced by the French government. The software is capable of eavesdropping on online conversations, such as those held on Skype, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger.
Hundreds of members of the Tibetan community are being targeted by email-based malware attacks that leverage the March 10 Tibetan Uprising anniversary as a theme. This report analyzes two March 10 related attacks. One using a new malware family we call MsAttacker , and another using the ShadowNet malware family and command and control infrastructure related to previous campaigns that targeted the Tibetan community.
The research findings documented in this report suggest that Hacking Team may have continued to provide updated versions of its spyware to the same attacker who have targeted ESAT journalists based in the United States in 2014, despite reports of use of the spyware against journalists.
