Citizen Lab press releases
Our latest report analyzes our discovery of an Android application called Qatif Today that is bundled with a Hacking Team payload. The app provides news and information in Arabic with a special relevance to the Qatif Governorate of Saudi Arabia, which is a predominantly-Shia community.
The Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto is one of ten non-profits in the U.S. and abroad to receive the New Digital Age Grants, funded through a $1 million donation by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.
Our analysis traces Hacking Team’s Remote Control System’s (RCS) proxy chains, and finds that dedicated US-based servers are part of the RCS infrastructure implemented by the governments of Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ethiopia, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates in their espionage and/or law enforcement operations.
Citizen Lab is one of seven nonprofit organizations around the world to receive the 2014 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.
This report maps out covert surveillance networks of “proxy servers” used to launder data that RCS exfiltrates from infected computers, through third countries, to an “endpoint,” which we believe represents the spyware’s government operator.
Our latest report identified three instances where Ethiopian journalist group ESAT was targeted with spyware in the space of two hours by a single attacker. In each case, the spyware appeared to be RCS (Remote Control System), which is programmed and sold exclusively to governments by Milan-based Hacking Team.
