This is an update to our November 2011 report titledThe Canadian Connection: An investigation of Syrian government and Hezbullah web hosting in Canada, which examined the use of web servers based in Canada, the U.S., and European countries to host Syrian government websites and websites of the Lebanese political party Hezbullah. Our findings indicate that, while many of the websites we examined in 2011 have changed hosting providers, a number of Syrian government and Hezbullah websites still maintain an online presence through the services of North American and European web hosts.

Google Policy Fellow Kieran Bergmann wrote an opinion piece for iPolitics titled, “Throttling free speech, at home and abroad.”

Ethiopia remains a dangerous country in which to express dissent online. The recent conviction of a number of bloggers and journalists, combined with the country’s history of filtering critical political content online, demonstrates the restrictive nature of the country’s information environment. This blog post describes recent developments in the country and reports on the results of ONI testing conducted in September 2012.

The Citizen Lab, Russian secret services watchdog Agentura.Ru, and Privacy International have launched a collaborative project to examine ‘Russia’s Surveillance State.’ As part of this project, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan of Agentura.Ru published a piece in Wired magazine on November 1, 2012, titled The Kremlin’s New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today.

On September 12-14, 2012, the Citizen Lab and Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) organized a workshop on international cyber norms for the second time at MIT in Cambridge, MA.

After years spent as one of the world’s most strictly controlled information environments, the government of Burma has recently begun to open up access to previously censored online content. Recent OpenNet Initiative testing has confirmed these changes, finding a variety of opposition websites, critical blogs and foreign news sites to be accessible after years of blocking. This ONI blog post discusses recent developments in Burma and reports on the results of testing conducted in Burma in August 2012.

In this report, Citizen Lab Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire describes analysis performed on malicious software used to compromise a high profile dissident residing in the United Arab Emirates. The findings indicate that the software is a commercial surveillance backdoor distributed by an Italian company known as Hacking Team. The report also describes the potential involvement of vulnerabilities sold by the French company, VUPEN.

This edition of the Latin America and The Caribbean CyberWatch covers related developments from Cuba, Jamaica, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil.

In this blog post, we report on malware campaigns targeting human rights groups using the PlugX Remote Access Trojan (RAT).