On June 14, 2022, Bill C-26, an Act respecting cybersecurity, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts, was introduced into Parliament for the first reading by Canada’s Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendicino. Hearings on Bill C-26 are scheduled to begin in SECU (the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Safety and… Read more »

Amnesty International’s Security Lab has just published Caught in the Net as part of the European Investigative Collaborations‘ Predator Files, which details a threat actor sending what they assess to be Predator infection links on social media in replies to Twitter / X posts by officials, journalists and other members of civil society. The Citizen… Read more »

In an investigative collaboration with Access Now, the Citizen Lab has analyzed forensic artifacts from the iPhone of award-winning exiled Russian investigative journalist Galina Timchenko and found with high confidence that on or around February 10th, 2023 it was infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. 

Citizen Lab found an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability being used to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware while checking the device of an individual employed by a Washington DC-based civil society organization with international offices. We refer to the exploit chain as BLASTPASS. The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim.

In an interview with As It Happens with Nil Köksal, Chris Howden on CBC Radio, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert discussed Jamal Khashoggi’s widow Hanan Elatr’s lawsuit against Israeli spyware company NSO. Hanan Elatr Khashoggi claimed in a civil lawsuit lodged with the Northern District of Virginia that NSO “intentionally targeted” her devices and “caused… Read more »

The Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto invites applications for a full-time tenure stream position in the area of Social Sciences and Digital Technologies.

The Citizen Lab is thrilled to welcome Mohamed Ahmed, the recipient of the 2023 Reset Scholarship in Social Media and Democracy.

The Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) fosters research, outputs, and creative collaboration on repressive Internet censorship and surveillance issues. The program supports examination into how governments in countries, regions, or areas of OTF’s core focus are restricting the free flow of information, cutting access to the open Internet, and… Read more »

On December 15, 2022, as part of our regular re-analysis of past cases to find additional spyware infection indicators and details, we discovered that a researcher had misread the labels assigned to two individuals’ results, leading to a confusion between phones owned by two people with the same initials who were part of the same… Read more »